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3Sp iFtfiifee. 

ESSAYS AND PHILOSOPHY. 

A CENTURY OF SCIENCE, and other Essays. Crown 

8vo, $2.00. 

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS: Old Tales and Supersti¬ 
tions interpreted by Comparative Mythology, Crown 8vo 
$2.00. 

OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. Based on the 
Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the Positive Philo¬ 
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THE UNSEEN WORLD, and other Essays. Crown 8vo 

$2.00. m 

EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST. Crown 8vo, 
$ 2 . 00 . 

DARWINISM, and other Essays. Crown 8vo, $2.00. 

THE DESTINY OF MAN, viewed in the Light of His Ori¬ 
gin. i6mo, $1.00. 

THE IDEA OF GOD, as affected by Modern Knowledge. 

i6mo, $1.00. 

THROUGH NATURE TO GOD. i6mo, $1.00. 

LIFE EVERLASTING. i6mo, $1.00, postpaid, $1.07. 

For complete list of Mr. Fiske's Historical and Philosophical 
Works, and Essays, see pages at the back of this work. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, 

Boston and New York. 




DARWINISM, AND OTHER 
ESSAYS 

By JOHN FISKE 


NEW EDITION , REVISED AND ENLARGED 


“ Qui itaque suos affectus et appetitus ex solo libertatis amore 
moderari studet, is, quantum potest, nitetur, virtutes earumque 
causas noscere, et animum gaudio, quod ex earum vera cogni- 
tione oritur, implere.” — Spinoza 

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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
(Cftf GittersiDe CamlmDfle 












') LIBRARY of GONGRESsf 

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ACS 

F6&.S- 

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COPYRIGHT 1879 AND l8S£ BY JOHN FISKE 
COPYRIGHT 1907 BY ABBY M. FISKE 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 








To 


THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, 

IN REMEMBRANCE OP 
THREE HAPPY DAYS AT PETERSHAM, 
AMONG THE BLUE HILLS OP MASSACHUSETTS, 
AND OP MANY 

PLEASANT FIRESIDE CHATS IN LONDON, 

31 betucate 

THIS LITTLE BOOK. 


London, June 30, 1879. 

















































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l. 








































































































































PREFATORY NOTE 


TO THE SECOND EDITION. 


My dear Hijxley: — In publishing a new 
edition of this collection of essays, which has 
been for some time out of print, I have taken oc¬ 
casion to add three articles not heretofore re¬ 
printed. It was with some hesitation that in 
originally making up the book I included the ar¬ 
ticle on “ Mr. Buckle’s Fallacies,” which was the 
first writing of mine that ever appeared in print, 
and naturally bears many marks of immaturity 
in thought and style. It was partly because so 
many friends had expressed a desire to see it 
again that I decided to include it; partly also be¬ 
cause it is to me associated with the beginnings 
of two of the most treasured friendships of my 
life, — first with Herbert Spencer, and afterwards, 
through a somewhat longer but still unmistaka¬ 
ble chain of causation, with yourself. Those 
nodes ccenceque Deum of the old times in London 



vi Prefatory Note, 

become more and more sacred in memory as the 
years pass by, even while it is hoped there may 
be yet others like them in reserve; and whatever 
recalls them, however indirectly, becomes en¬ 
deared to me. 

Having for such reasons, largely personal, re¬ 
published this article, I have found it so well re¬ 
ceived and so kindly mentioned that it has seemed 
worth while to look up and add to this somewhat 
miscellaneous collection three other youthful writ¬ 
ings. The brief remarks on “ Comte’s Positive 
Philosophy ” serve to explain some crude expres¬ 
sions in the paper on Buckle which might other¬ 
wise be interpreted as the words of a “ Positivist.” 
After twenty years of vigorous and untiring pro¬ 
test, I believe we may congratulate ourselves that 
we have got that wretched label pretty thoroughly 
torn off. “ Agnostic,” which seems for the time 
to have replaced it, is meaningless enough, and I 
for one no more accept it than I accepted the old 
epithet. But its utter vagueness renders it com¬ 
paratively harmless, whereas “ Positivist ” was a 
word brimful of meaning. It connoted almost 
everything in the shape of hasty superficial gen¬ 
eralization and overweening intellectual arro¬ 
gance which the true servant and interpreter of 
Nature instinctively and rightly abhors. We may 


Prefatory Note. vij 

rejoice that the time has come at last when a man 
may abandon old mythologies and devote himself 
to the disinterested pursuit of science, without 
being supposed to be an aider and abettor of the 
colossal vagaries of the vainest of modern French¬ 
men. 

The two other early papers, on “ Liberal Edu¬ 
cation ” and “ University Reform,” deal with sub¬ 
jects about which we used sometimes to talk to¬ 
gether ; and on looking them over, they seem to 
contain suggestions not wholly without a bearing 
upon questions just now warmly discussed at our 
Cambridge. I have therefore added them to the 
book. In some of the twelve essays of the origi¬ 
nal edition I have made a few slight changes. 

I say now, as I said before, that I wish it were 
a better book I were offering you. But, such as 
it is, it is offered with all my heart. 

Ever faithfully yours, 

JOHN FISKE. 


Petersham, October 14 , 1885 . 























































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CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

I. Darwinism Verified.1 

II. Mr. Miyart on Darwinism .... 33 

III. Dr. Bateman on Darwinism . . . .40 

IV. Dr. Buchner on Darwinism .... 50 

V. A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium ” . .56 

VL Chauncey Wright.79 

VII. What is Inspiration? .Ill 

VIII. Modern Witchcraft.120 

IX. Comte’s Positive Philosophy . . . .131 

X. Mr. Buckle’s Fallacies. 143 

XI. Postscript on Mr. Buckle. 207 

XII. The Paces of the Danube . . . .219 

XIII. Liberal Education. 253 

XIV. University Reform. 287 

XV. A Librarian’s Work . . . . . .332 
























































































































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DARWINISM AND OTHER ESSAYS. 


I. 


DARWINISM VERIFIED. 

It is not often that the propounder of a new 
and startling scientific theory has lived to see his 
daring innovations accepted by the scientific 
world in general. Harvey’s great discovery of 
the circulation of the blood was scoffed at for 
nearly a whole generation; and Newton’s law of 
gravitation, though proved by the strictest math¬ 
ematical proof, received from many eminent men 
but a slow and grudging acquiescence. Even 
Leibnitz, who, as a mathematician hardly inferior 
to Newton himself, might have been expected to 
be convinced on simple inspection of the theory, 
was prevented from accepting it by the theo¬ 
logical objection that it appeared to substitute 
the action of a physical force for the direct ac¬ 
tion of the Deity. In France, where ideas not 
of French origin are very apt to be but slowly 
l 



2 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

apprehended, the opposition to the Newtonian 
theory was not silenced till 1759, when Clairaut 
and Lalande, by calculating the retardation of 
Halley’s comet, furnished such crucial proof as 
could not possibly be overcome. At this time 
Newton had been thirty-two years in his grave ; 
seventy-two years had elapsed since the publi¬ 
cation of the 44 Principia,” and ninety-four since 
the hypothesis was first definitely conceived. 

In the present age, when the number of sci¬ 
entific inquirers has greatly increased and the in¬ 
terchange of thoughts has become rapid and con¬ 
stant, it takes much less time for a new gener¬ 
alization to make its way into people’s minds. 
It is now barely eighteen years since Mr. Dar¬ 
win’s views on the origin of species were an¬ 
nounced in a book which purported to be only 
the rough preliminary sketch of a greater work 
in course of preparation. But, though greeted at 
the beginning with ridicule and opprobrium, the 
theory of natural selection has already won a 
complete and overwhelming victory. One could 
count on one’s fingers the number of eminent 
naturalists who still decline to adopt it, and the 
hesitancy of these appears to be determined in 
the main by theological or metaphysical, and 
therefore not strictly relevant, objections. But 


Darwinism Verified. 3 

it is not simply that the great body of naturalists 
have accepted the Darwinian theory: it has be¬ 
come part and parcel of their daily thoughts, an 
element in every investigation which cannot be 
got rid of. With a tacit consent that is almost 
unanimous, the classificatory relations among 
plants and animals have come to be recognized 
as representing degrees of genetic kinship. One 
needs but to read constantly such scientific jour¬ 
nals as “ Nature,” or to peer into the proceedings 
of scientific societies, to see how thoroughly all 
contemporary inquiry is permeated by the con¬ 
ception of natural selection. The record of re¬ 
search, whether in embryology, in palaeontology, 
or in the study of the classification and distri¬ 
bution of organized beings, has come to be the 
registration of testimony in support of Mr. Dar¬ 
win’s hypothesis. So deeply, indeed, has this 
mighty thinker impressed his thoughts on the 
mind of the age that in order fully to unfold the 
connotations of the word “ Darwinism ” one could 
hardly stop short of making an index to the 
entire recent literature of the organic sciences. 
The sway of natural selection in biology is hardly 
less complete than that of gravitation in astron¬ 
omy ; and thus it is probably true that no other 
scientific discoverer has within his own lifetime 


4 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

obtained so magnificent a triumph as Mr. Dar¬ 
win. 

The comparison of the doctrine of natural selec¬ 
tion with the Newtonian theory is made advisedly, 
as I wish to call attention to some differences in 
the aspect of the proofs by which two such differ¬ 
ent hypotheses are established. First, however, 
as the point will not hereafter come up for con¬ 
sideration in this paper, it may be well to notice 
the theological objection which has been urged 
against Mr. Darwin, as it was once urged against 
Newton, and to show briefly why, as above hinted, 
it cannot be regarded as properly relevant to the 
discussion of the scientific hypothesis. The the¬ 
ological objection to natural selection, which has 
weight with many minds, is precisely the same 
objection that Leibnitz made to gravitation,— 
that the action of physical forces appears to be 
substituted for the direct action of the Deity. 
This has, indeed, been a very common objection 
to theories which enlarge and define what is 
called the action of secondary causes, but it has 
been peculiarly unfortunate in this respect, that 
with the progress of inquiry it has invariably 
been overruled without practical detriment to 
theism. It regularly happens that the so-called 
atheistical theory becomes accepted as part and 


Darwinism Verified . 5 

parcel of science, and yet men remain as firm 
theists as ever. The objection is, therefore, evi¬ 
dently fallacious, and the fallacy is not difficult 
to point out. It lies in a metaphysical miscon¬ 
ception of the words 44 force ” and 44 cause.” 
44 Force” is implicitly regarded as a sort of en¬ 
tity or dsemon which has a mode of action distin¬ 
guishable from that of universal Deity; other¬ 
wise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the 
one for the other. But such a personification of 
44 force ” is a remnant of barbaric thought, and is 
in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When 
astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting 
each other with a “force” which varies directly 
as their masses and inversely as the squares of 
their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase 
as a convenient metaphor by which to describe 
the manner in which the observed movements of 
the two bodies occur. It explains that in pres¬ 
ence of each other the two bodies are observed to 
change their positions in a certain specified way, 
and this is all that it means. This is all that a 
strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, 
and this is all that observation can possibly prove. 
Whatever goes beyond this, and imagines or as¬ 
serts a kind of 44 pull” between the two bodies, 
is not science, but metaphysics. An atheistic 


6 


Darwinism and Other Essays . 

metaphysics may imagine such a “pull,” and 
may interpret it as the “ action ” of something 
that is not Deity, but such a conclusion can find 
no support in the scientific theorem, which is 
simply a generalized description of -phenomena. 
The general considerations upon which the belief 
in the existence and direct action of Deity are 
otherwise founded are in no wise disturbed by 
the establishment of any such scientific theorem. 
The theological question is left just where it was 
before. We are still at perfect liberty to main¬ 
tain that it is the direct action of Deity which is 
manifested in the planetary movements; having 
done nothing more with our Newtonian hypoth¬ 
esis than to construct a happy formula for ex¬ 
pressing the mode or order of the manifestation. 
We may have learned something new concerning 
the manner of Divine action ; we certainly have 
not “ substituted ” any other kind of action for it. 
And what is thus obvious in this simple astro¬ 
nomical example is equally true in principle in 
every case whatever in which one set of phenom¬ 
ena is interpreted by comparison with another 
set. In no case whatever can science use the 
words “ force ” or “ cause ” except as metaphori¬ 
cally descriptive of some observed or observable 
sequence of phenomena. And consequently at 


Darwinism Verified. % 7 

no imaginable future time, so long as the essen¬ 
tial conditions of human thinking are maintained, 
can science even attempt to substitute the action 
of any other power for the direct action of Deity. 
Darwinism may convince us that the existence 
of highly complicated organisms is the result of 
an infinitely diversified aggregate of circumstances 
so minute as severally to seem trivial or acciden- 
tal; yet the consistent theist will always occupy 
an impregnable position in maintaining that the 
entire series in each and every one of its incidents 
is an immediate manifestation of the creative ac¬ 
tion of God. 

From an obverse point of view it might be ar¬ 
gued that since a philosophical theism must regard 
Divine power as the immediate source of all phe¬ 
nomena alike, therefore science cannot properly 
explain any particular group of phenomena by a 
direct reference to the action of Deity. Such a 
reference is not an explanation, since it adds noth¬ 
ing to our previous knowledge either of the phe¬ 
nomena or of the manner of Divine action. The 
business of science is simply to ascertain in what 
manner phenomena co-exist with each other or 
follow each other, and the only kind of explana¬ 
tion with which it can properly deal is that which 
refers one set of phenomena to another set. In 


8 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

pursuing this its legitimate business, science does 
not trench on the province of theology in any 
way, and there is no conceivable occasion for any 
conflict between the two. From this and the pre¬ 
vious considerations, taken together, it follows not 
only that such explanations as are contained in 
the Newtonian and Darwinian theories are en¬ 
tirely consistent with theism, but also that they 
are the only kind of explanations with which sci¬ 
ence can properly concern itself at all. To say 
that complex organisms were directly created by 
the Deity is to make an assertion which, however 
true in a theistic sense, is utterly barren. It is 
of no profit to theism, which must be taken for 
granted before the assertion can be made ; and it 
is of no profit to science, which must still ask its 
question, “ How ? ” 1 

Setting aside, then, the theological criticism as 
irrelevant to the question really at stake, the Dar¬ 
winian theory, like the Newtonian, remains to be 
tested by strictly scientific considerations. In the 
more recent instance, as in the earlier, the rel¬ 
evant question is how far the course of events as 
sketched by the hypothesis agrees with the ob- 

1 I have repeated this argument, and surrounded it with its proper 
philosophical context, in The Idea of God , as affected by Modern 
Knowledge, section VII. 


Darwinism Verified. 9 

served phenomena of nature. But in the direct¬ 
ness with which this question can be answered 
there is great difference between the two theories. 
The Newtonian hypothesis asserted the existence 
of a general physical property of matter, and could 
therefore be tested by a single crucial instance, 
such as was afforded by the simple case of the 
planetary motions. Kepler’s three laws comprised 
in succinct form a very complete description of the 
movements of the planets; and when it was shown 
that these movements were just such as must oo 
cur according to the theory of gravitation, the 
theory was rightly regarded as verified. Further 
confirmatory instances could but repeat the same 
lesson, as when the irregularities of movement, 
due to the attractions exercised by the various 
planets upon each other, were likewise seen to 
conform strictly to the hypothesis. Nor was any 
alteration or enlargement of the original theory 
required in order to obtain the supreme triumph 
of verified prediction, as when Clairaut foretold 
the precise amount of delay in the reappearance 
of Halley’s comet, caused by the interfering attrac¬ 
tions of Jupiter and Saturn, or as when Leverrier 
and Adams discovered the existence of Neptune 
through its effects upon the motions of Uranus. 
In all these cases the physical principle involved 


10 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

was simple, and admitted of precise mathematical 
treatment; and it is owing to this that the law of 
gravitation has become the most illustrious exam¬ 
ple which the history of science gan furnish of a 
completely verified hypothesis. 

To look for similar conciseness of verification 
in the case of the Darwinian theory would be to 
mistake entirely the conditions under which sci¬ 
entific evidence can be procured. To estimate 
properly the value of any hypothesis, it is neces¬ 
sary that we should know what kind and degree 
of proof to expect; and in the present case we 
must not look for a demonstration that shall be di¬ 
rect and simple. Instead of a universal property 
of matter, so conspicuous as to be recognized at 
once by the inspection of a few striking instances, 
we have in the theory of natural selection to 
deal with a very complex process, working results 
of endless diversity throughout the organic world, 
and often masked in its action by accompanying 
processes, some of which we can detect without 
being able to estimate their relative potency, 
while others, no doubt, have thus far escaped our 
attention altogether. Accordingly, while we may 
consider it as certain that natural selection is ca¬ 
pable of working specific changes in organisms, we 
may at the same time find it impossible to give a 


Darwinism Verified . 11 

complete account of the origin of any one particu¬ 
lar species through natural selection, because we 
can never be sure that we have taken due notice 
of all the innumerable concrete circumstances in¬ 
volved in such an event. The theory, therefore, 
cannot be adequately tested by any single striking 
instance, but must depend for its support on the 
cumulative evidence afforded by its general har¬ 
mony with the processes of organic nature. 

If we consider the Darwinian theory as a whole, 
it must be admitted that such cumulative evi¬ 
dence has already been brought forward in suffi¬ 
cient quantity to amount to a satisfactory demon¬ 
stration. The convergence of proofs is too per¬ 
sistent and unmistakable to allow of any alter¬ 
native hypothesis being put in the field. But, in 
exhibiting this, it is desirable that there should 
be no confusion of thought as to the full import 
of the Darwinian theory. Mr. Mivart’s way of 
describing that theory as an attempt to account 
for the origin of all the various forms of life 
through the operation of natural selection alone 
is a gross misrepresentation. Mr. Darwin has 
never urged his hypothesis in this limited shape. 
The essential theorems of Darwinism are, first , 
that forms of life now widely unlike have been 
produced from a common original through the ac* 


12 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

cumulated inheritance of minute individual mod¬ 
ifications ; and, secondly, that such modifications 
have been accumulated mainly, or in great part, 
through the selection of individuals best fitted to 
survive and transmit their peculiarities to their 
offspring. But that this survival of the fittest 
individuals has been the sole agency concerned in 
bringing about the present wondrous variety of 
living beings Mr. Darwin has nowhere asserted 
or implied, having even in the earliest edition of 
his great work explicitly pointed out certain other 
agencies as involved in the complex result. Yet 
other agencies, hitherto unsuspected, may be dis¬ 
covered in the future; but such discoveries, how¬ 
ever far they may go in supplementing the Dar¬ 
winian theory, can only strengthen the central 
position as regards the rise of specific differences 
through gradual modifications. 

That natural selection is a true cause, and one 
capable of accumulating variations to an indefi¬ 
nite extent, is now held to be beyond question. 
The wonders wrought by artificial selection in 
the breeding of domestic animals and cultivated 
plants are such that one might well have attrib¬ 
uted great results to the exercise of a similar se¬ 
lection by Nature through countless ages, could 
any such process be detected. Few, however, 


Darwinism Verified. 13 

save those instructed naturalists who have fre¬ 
quent occasion to ponder the subject, are aware 
what a tremendous reality natural selection is. 
As I have elsewhere observed, “ a single codfish 
has been known to lay six million eggs within a 
year. If these eggs were all to become adult cod¬ 
fishes, and the multiplication were to continue at 
this rate for three or four years, the ocean would 
not afford room for the species. Yet we have no 
reason to suppose that the race of codfishes is ac¬ 
tually increasing in numbers to any notable ex¬ 
tent. With the codfish, as with animal species in 
general, the numbers during many successive gen¬ 
erations oscillate about a point which is fixed, or 
moves but slowly forward or backward. Instead 
of a geometrical increase with a ratio of six mill¬ 
ions, there is practically no marked increase at all. 
Now this implies that out of the six million em¬ 
bryo codfish a sufficient number will survive to 
replace their two parents, and to replace a certain 
small proportion of those contemporary codfishes 
who leave no progeny. Perhaps a dozen may 
suffice for this, perhaps a hundred. The rest of 
the six million must die.” 1 The amount of de¬ 
struction is not so great as this in all parts of the 
animal kingdom. Among the higher birds and 

1 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 12. 


14 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

mammals the preservation of the individual bears 
a very much higher ratio to the preservation of 
the race. But with the immense classes of fishes, 
insects, and crustaceans, as well as the sub-king¬ 
dom of mollusks, — which taken together make 
up by far the greater portion of the animal world, 
— the destruction continually going on is prob¬ 
ably not less than that which is described in the 
example cited. Even if we were to take account 
only of the individuals which survive the embryo 
or larva state, but do not succeed in leaving off¬ 
spring behind them, the cases of destruction would 
still bear an enormous ratio to the cases of pres¬ 
ervation. But in maintaining the characteristics 
of a race only those individuals can be counted 
who produce offspring. It is obvious, then, that 
each species of organisms, as we know it, consists 
only of a few favoured individuals selected out of 
countless multitudes who have been tried and re¬ 
jected as unworthy to live. No selection that is 
exercised by man compares in rigour with this. 
It is somewhat as if a breeder of race-horses were 
to choose, with infallible accuracy of judgment, 
the two or three fleetest out of each hundred 
thousand, destroying all the rest, that the high 
standard of the breed might run no possible risk 
of deterioration. In such a rigorous competition 


Darwinism Verified . 15 

as this, no individual peculiarity can be so slight 
that we are entitled to regard it as unimportant. 
No peculiarity is really slight that enables its 
possessor to survive until he transmits it to pos¬ 
terity. 

In view of all this we see how misleading it is 
to describe natural selection (as Mr. Mivart does) 
as a process which operates only occasionally upon 
variations assumed to be fortuitous. We see that 
natural selection, like a power that slumbers not 
nor sleeps, is ever preserving the stability of spe¬ 
cies by seizing all individual peculiarities that os¬ 
cillate within narrow limits on either side of the 
mean that is most advantageous to the species, 
while cutting off all such peculiarities as trans¬ 
gress these limits. Domesticated animals, pro¬ 
tected from the exigencies of wild life, often 
exhibit great varieties in colouring, while wild 
animals of the same genus or species are monoto¬ 
nously coloured, because only one kind of colour¬ 
ing will aid them in catching prey or eluding ene¬ 
mies, and all the variations are killed out. Who 
can doubt that antelopes are so fleet only because 
all but the fleetest individuals are sure to be over¬ 
taken and eaten by lions ? Protected from the 
lions, a thousand generations might well make 
them as lazy and clumsy as sheep. 


16 


Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Operating in this stern way, natural selection 
secures the general adaptation of each race of or¬ 
ganisms to the conditions of life which surround 
it. And so long as a species continues surrounded 
by circumstances that are tolerably persistent, 
natural selection maintains its stability of char¬ 
acter. Thus what the older naturalists called the 
“ fixity of species ” is fully accounted for. But a 
“fixity of species ” that is maintained only under 
such conditions is really no fixity at all. Change 
the surrounding circumstances, and the average 
character of the species must change. Slight pe¬ 
culiarities that once insured survival will now 
insure destruction, and tendencies to vary that 
once would have been nipped short will now be 
encouraged and exaggerated. In this way the 
strong tendency, hereditary in all mammals, to¬ 
ward the growth of hair on the surface, was 
greatly exaggerated in the Siberian mammoth, 
while checked in his brethren, the elephants of 
India and Africa. In this way a peculiar curve 
in the contour of butterflies’ wings, which is per¬ 
sistently killed out in India and Java, is with 
equal persistency selected for preservation in 
Celebes. How far such alterations in the direc¬ 
tion of natural selection may work deep-seated 
changes in the structure of an organism one can- 


Darwinism Verified . 17 

not accurately define ; but there is no doubt that 
they go very far indeed, when taken in connec¬ 
tion with the facts of what is called “ correlation 
of growth.” An organism is not a mere aggre¬ 
gation of parts, of which one can be altered with¬ 
out affecting the others. Increase in the size 
and weight of a deer’s horns entails an increase 
in the size of the cervical vertebrae and muscles, 
and indirectly modifies the shoulders and fore¬ 
limbs ; while all these changes, by altering the 
animal’s centre of gravity, cause compensating 
changes in the rest of the body. Increased thick¬ 
ness of fur modifies the efficiency of the skin as 
an excreting organ, and thus reacts upon the 
lungs, liver, and kidneys. But it is not only in 
these clearly traceable ways that correlation of 
growth is manifested. Sometimes the correla¬ 
tions are inexplicable. Thus, to lengthen the 
beak of a pigeon is to increase the size of his 
feet, hairless dogs have their teeth imperfect, and 
white tpmcats with blue eyes are almost invari¬ 
ably deaf. In the present state of physiological 
knowledge we cannot account for such facts; but 
it is enough for the purposes of the Darwinian 
theory to know that they exist. For, taken all 
together, they show that natural selection, oper¬ 
ating on even the most superficial variations, is 


18 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

quite competent to work deep-seated changes of 
structure and function. 

When we consider, then, that the circumstances 
which determine what individuals shall survive 
are not constant in the long run for any species, 
though apparently constant for limited periods of 
time ; when we reflect that there is no one of 
the larger groups of plants and animals — such as 
orders, or families, or even genera -— which have 
not been subjected again and again to great and 
complicated changes of environment, it becomes 
evident that anything like “ fixity of species ” is 
utterly out of the question. No such thing is 
possible or even imaginable, when once the facts 
of the case have been thoroughly conceived. 
Looking over the earth’s surface to-day, things 
may seem quiet and stable enough. But if we 
contemplate the succession of past events, as dis¬ 
closed by the geologist, what mainly strikes our 
attention is the secular turmoil. Islands aggre¬ 
gating into continents ; continents breaking up 
into archipelagoes; rivers shifting their beds; 
coast-lines changing their direction ; oceans now 
separated by impassable isthmus-walls, now min¬ 
gling their floras and faunas through new-made 
channels; torrid zones becoming temperate, and 
temperate zones growing frigid; marshes trans- 


Darwinism Verified. 19 

formed into deserts, and glaciated valleys thaw¬ 
ing into sunny lakes; high table-lands sinking 
into ocean-floors, and submarine ledges rearing 
their heads as Alpine ranges ; deep-sea mollusks 
and crustaceans seeking refuge in shallow waters, 
while littoral organisms migrate upland to find 
new food and contend with new enemies ; plant- 
seeds carried by vagrant birds to unwonted hab¬ 
itats ; peaceful tribes of ruminants decimated by 
invading carnivores ; ceaseless conflict, and redis¬ 
tribution of every possible sort, — these are the 
things we are called upon to contemplate. Re¬ 
membering, then, how stability of species is main¬ 
tained only by the rigorous selection of a few in¬ 
dividuals that are best adapted to a given set of 
exigencies, we see that, as the combinations of 
exigencies are altered from time to time, the sta¬ 
bility of species can in general be but temporary. 
Now and then we may expect to find very long 
persistency of type where, in spite of great ter¬ 
restrial changes, some simple set of conditions 
most important to the organism remains unal¬ 
tered; but in the vast majority of cases such per¬ 
sistence is impossible. It is seldom that the life 
of any species extends over more than one geo¬ 
logical epoch; often the duration is much shorter 
than this. 


20 


Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Whether, therefore, it is practicable for us to¬ 
day to explain every minute peculiarity of any 
one particular species by an appeal to natural se¬ 
lection alone is not the main point to be consid¬ 
ered in estimating the success of the Darwinian 
theory. The question has a scientific interest of 
its own which is very great, but it is not the main 
question. The main point is that, admitting nat¬ 
ural selection to be a vera causa at all (and this 
no one denies), the stability of species is proved 
to be but a contingent and temporary affair. The 
old notion of an absolute fixity of species is over¬ 
thrown once for all, and with it the only sem¬ 
blance of an argument that could ever have been 
alleged in behalf of the hypothesis of special cre¬ 
ations. For in considering nearly allied forms, 
like the lion, tiger, and leopard, their actual con¬ 
sanguinity would never have been doubted for a 
moment but for the inability of naturalists to un¬ 
derstand how the type which appears so constant, 
when viewed through a short period of time and 
amid unchanging conditions, should after all be 
variable. Unable to imagine any probable cause 
or method of variation by which the descendants 
of a common feline ancestor should have acquired 
the divergent characters of lions and leopards, the 
naturalist either gave up the problem as insoluble, 


Darwinism Verified. 21 

or else retreated upon the assumption that leop¬ 
ards and lions were separately created. In either 
case science was equally at fault; for, as above 
argued, the hypothesis of special creations, as re¬ 
ferring a particular group of phenomena to that 
Divine action which is the equal source of all phe¬ 
nomena, is not entitled to be considered a scien¬ 
tific explanation. But when Mr. Darwin called 
attention to the working of natural selection, the 
difficulty was removed, and it at once became 
highly probable that such allied forms had di¬ 
verged from a common stock through the accumu¬ 
lation of minute modifications. 

Such being the conclusion to which we are led 
by considering the process of natural selection, it 
becomes desirable to inquire whether the conclu¬ 
sion is confirmed by the most general phenomena 
of organic life that have been observed and tab¬ 
ulated. There is no hesitation or ambiguity in 
the answer. Whether we consider the classifi- 
catory relationships of plants and animals, their 
embryology, their morphology, their geographical 
distribution, or their geological succession, there 
is not only abundance of evidence, but the evi¬ 
dence points wholly in one direction. With en¬ 
tire unanimity the phenomena in question testify 
that species have arisen by descent with modifi- 


22 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

cations, and not by disconnected acts of creation. 
The facts of classification alone are sufficiently 
decisive. By the older naturalists, who sought to 
arrange animals and plants in groups according to 
their resemblances, attempts were often made to 
construct a linear series in which each group 
should be intermediate between those which pre¬ 
ceded and those which followed it. All such at¬ 
tempts proved futile, and after a half-century of 
discussion and criticism it became evident that 
the only possible classification which correctly 
represents the facts is one in which organisms are 
arranged in divergent groups and sub-groups, like 
the branches and twigs of what is aptly termed a 
family tree. Wherever different orders, families, 
or genera show points of resemblance to each 
other, the resemblances occur always at the bot¬ 
tom, among their least highly developed species. 
Apes, bats, and rabbits are sufficiently distinct in 
type, but the lowest members of the orders to 
which these animals respectively belong are strik¬ 
ingly like one another. At the bottom of the 
mammalian class, the echidna and duck-bill have 
many points in common with birds and reptiles; 
while birds and reptiles not only draw together so 
that it is hard to distinguish their most primitive 
forms as clearly bird or clearly reptile, but these 


Darwinism Verified. 23 

primitive forms remind one in many ways of the 
batrachians. A batrachian, in turn, is an animal 
which ends its life as a kind of reptile after hav¬ 
ing begun it as a kind of imperfectly specialized 
fish. Again, the lowest known vertebrate, the 
amphioxus, usually ranked with fishes, though 
hardly specialized enough to be called a true fish, 
exhibits marks of actual relationship with the 
ascidian, which is nothing more than a worm of 
the order known as tunicata. No two animals 
could be less like each other than a bee and a 
nautilus, yet in their lowest members the two 
sub-kingdoms of articulata and mollusks become 
barely distinguishable from each other and from 
the worms with which the vertebrate sub-kingdom 
also becomes blended. It is on account of this 
convergence of types as we descend in the scale 
that naturalists have found it so difficult to clas¬ 
sify satisfactorily those lower organisms which Cu¬ 
vier roughly grouped together as radiata. Par¬ 
allel phenomena recur as we reach the confines of 
the animal and vegetal kingdoms, and meet with 
numbers of organisms which there is as much 
reason for assigning to the one kingdom as to the 
other. All this complicated arrangement of or¬ 
ganisms in groups within groups, resembling each 
other at the bottom of the scale, and differing 


24 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

most widely at the top, is just what is presupposed 
by the Darwinian theory of 44 descent with mod¬ 
ification,” and on any other theory it appears to 
be totally inexplicable. 

Precisely similar testimony as to gradual diver¬ 
gence is found in the facts of embryology and 
morphology. It is a familiar fact that the germs 
of all organisms are like each other, and are, 
moreover, very like such lowest forms of life as 
the amoeba and protococcus. But as a germ de¬ 
velops it becomes specialized and defined, first 
as to its sub-kingdom, then as to its class, order, 
family, genus, species, and variety. The germ¬ 
cell of a mandril is at first indistinguishable from 
that of a snail or lobster. The foetal ape arising 
therefrom is at first definable as a vertebrate, 
but not as a mammal; on the other hand, it cir¬ 
culates its blood through a system of gills, and 
its nascent heart is like the heart of a fish. Pres¬ 
ently, with the appearance of the allantoidal 
membrane, the foetus seems to be on the point of 
becoming a reptile or bird; but after a while it 
declares itself a mammal. Next it becomes ap¬ 
parent that it is not a rodent or insectivore, but 
a primate ; next, it exhibits characteristics which 
define it as a true ape, and not a lemur ; still later, 
it is seen to be a catarrhine ape ; and finally, it 


Darwinism Verified. 25 

is born with the specific attributes of a mandril, 
which are, however, further intensified as it 
reaches maturity. Facts like these, which are 
invariably found in the embryonic development 
of organisms, tell just the same story as the facts 
of classification. If they do not mean that the 
various forms of organic life have arisen by grad¬ 
ual divergence from a common original, one 
might well be excused for doubting whether the 
phenomena of nature have any rational meaning 
whatever. Of like import are many of the more 
special facts of embryology, such as the useless 
rudiments of hind limbs in many snakes, the 
presence of teeth in the beaks of sundry embry¬ 
onic birds and in the jaws of foetal whales, and the 
gill-like glands in the human throat. As if all 
this were not enough, the study of morphology 
discloses that all the diversified mechanical func¬ 
tions performed by the various animals comprised 
in any sub-kingdom are achieved by more or less 
considerable modifications of a framework that in 
its typical features is common to all. In embry¬ 
onic development the fins of the fish correspond 
with the legs of reptiles and mammals, and with 
the legs and wings of birds. To enable the bat 
to fly, no new mechanism is invented, but an 
embryonal hand develops into a wing by the 


26 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

elongation of its fingers and the growth of a web¬ 
like skin between them. 

If we consider the most general features of the 
geographical distribution and geological succes¬ 
sion of organisms, we find the evidence hardly 
less complete and convincing. Generally speak¬ 
ing, the contemporary species found in any geo¬ 
graphical area most closely resemble the species 
that inhabited the same area in former ages. 
Thus in the Miocene age Australia abounded in 
marsupials, and marsupials specifically different, 
though nearly allied to these, make up to-day the 
greater part of the mammalian fauna of Austra¬ 
lia. There is no imaginable reason why this 
should be so, unless the contemporary marsupials 
are descended from the earlier forms. It cannot 
be urged that marsupials are better adapted to 
the conditions of life in Australia than placental 
mammals ; for the placental mammals lately in¬ 
troduced there are already beginning to supplant 
and exterminate the marsupials. The only possi¬ 
ble explanation is that, whereas marsupials once 
covered the terrestrial globe, and have been sup¬ 
planted by better adapted forms in the Old 
World and (with the exception of the opossum) 
in America, on the other hand the isolation of 
Australia has allowed them there to go on repro- 


Darwinism Verified. 27 

ducing their kind until the present day. In such 
an instance as this we have something very nearly 
like crucial proof of the theory of “ descent with 
modifications.” In like manner the extinct eden- 
tata of South America are closely allied to the 
living ant-eaters, sloths, and armadilloes. So, 
too, the indigenous floras and faunas of islands 
lying near continents always resemble the floras 
and faunas of the continents near which they lie. 
The Galapagos archipelago, distant some five hun¬ 
dred miles from the coast of Ecuador, has a fauna 
which, though generically distinct from all others, 
is yet South American in type, and closely resem¬ 
bles the fauna of Ecuador. Again, among the ani¬ 
mals living on the different islands of this group, 
we find specific diversity along with generic iden¬ 
tity. On the Darwinian theory this is just what 
might be expected. The long isolation of the 
archipelago from the continent has given oppor¬ 
tunity for the rise of generic divergences between 
their once homogeneous faunas, while the briefer 
isolation of the several islands from each other 
has been attended by slighter, or specific, diver¬ 
gences ; and, as if to complete by contrast the 
force of the example, we find that the only ani¬ 
mals on the archipelago which are not generically 
different from their allies on the continent are 


28 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

birds, able to fly back and forth over the inter¬ 
vening sea. Unless the Darwinian theory be 
true, these striking relations not only become 
meaningless, but it is difficult to see why any 
discernible relations at all should exist between 
these neighboring faunas. To cite all the con¬ 
firmatory facts of this sort would be to write an 
exhaustive account of the distribution of plants 
and animals. 

In examining the geological record in general, 
we are struck with its corroboration of the above- 
cited testimony of classification and embryology. 
For instance, as we go back in time, we find fam¬ 
ilies and orders drawing more and more closely 
together; we find earlier forms less specialized 
than their successors; and, as we now have em¬ 
bryonic birds with rudimentary teeth in their 
beaks, so we find that formerly adult birds with 
such teeth existed. It is one of the most signifi¬ 
cant truths of palaeontology that extinct forms are 
generally intercalary between forms now existing; 
so that not only genera and families, but even 
orders, of contemporary animals are every now 
and then fused together by the discovery of ex¬ 
tinct intermediate forms. It is in this way that 
the Cuvierian orders of pachyderms and rumi¬ 
nants have come to be ranked as a single order, 


Darwinism Verified . 29 

the horse and pig being connected by numerous 
fossil links with the camel and antelope. Until 
quite lately there has been less success in the 
attempt to find a perfect series of transitional 
forms connecting some well-known animal with 
its generically different ancestor. But the argu¬ 
ment heretofore urged against the Darwinian 
theory, on the ground of this imperfect success, 
was at best a weak one, as resting merely upon 
the absence of evidence which further discovery 
might furnish at any moment. The Darwinian 
might candidly urge that his failure was due 
partly to the fragmentary character of the geolog¬ 
ical record, in which there is no reason for sup¬ 
posing that more than one form out of a hundred 
has been preserved, and partly to the fact that 
only a small portion of the earth’s surface has 
been explored by the paleontologist, and that por¬ 
tion but superficially. The justice of such a plea 
is rendered apparent, while the hostile argument 
is completely silenced, by the recent discoveries 
of Professor Marsh as to the paleontological his¬ 
tory of the ancestors of the horse. As these dis¬ 
coveries have just been well described in Profes¬ 
sor Huxley’s admirable lectures in New York, a 
brief mention here will suffice to show their im¬ 
port. 


80 


Darwinism and Other Essays. 

One of the most striking peculiarities of the 
equine genus — including the horse, ass, zebra, 
and quagga — is the modification of the limbs, so 
that what appears to be the horse’s fore-knee is 
really his wrist, and what in the hind-limb looks 
like a reversed knee is really his heel, while the 
lower halves of the legs are really feet terminat¬ 
ing in the middle toe armed with its nail, which 
we call the hoof. The two adjacent toes are rep¬ 
resented only by splint-bones on either side of 
the middle metacarpal or metatarsal, and the ra¬ 
dius and ulna in the fore-limb, as well as the tibia 
and fibula in the hind-limb, are almost completely 
fused together. Now according to the Darwinian 
theory, such a highly specialized animal as the 
horse must be descended from a less specialized 
mammal in which the limbs were like ordinary 
mammalian limbs, ending in ordinary feet with 
five separate toes each. The embryology of the 
horse points to this conclusion, and here, as usual, 
but with unwonted emphasis, palseontology con¬ 
firms the inference. Already in Europe had been 
found the three-toed hipparion, in which the two 
side toes were like dew-claws, and the older an- 
chitherium, in which all three toes were complete. 
But the discoveries of Professor Marsh have set 
before us a much more perfect series. Going 


Darwinism Verified . 31 

back in time, as we reach the upper Pliocene, 
the horse disappears, and we find the pliohippus, 
very much like him. In the lower Pliocene this 
creature is replaced by the protohippus, with 
three toes like the hipparion. In the upper Mio¬ 
cene we have the miohippus, with three well-de¬ 
veloped toes like the anchitherium, and with the 
rudiment of a fore-toe on the fore-foot. In the 
mesohippus of the lower Miocene this rudiment 
is a splint-bone, like those which represent the 
later-disappearing toes in the modern horse. By 
this time we find the ulna and fibula well devel¬ 
oped and distinct from the radius and tibia. Still 
further back, in the upper Eocene, comes the 
orohippus, with four complete toes on the fore¬ 
foot. And finally, in the lower Eocene, we get 
the eohippus, which shows the rudiment of a fifth 
toe on the front and a fourth toe on the hind foot. 
In the structure of the teeth — the other chief 
point in which the modern horse is notably spe¬ 
cialized — we find a similar gradation back to the 
ordinary mammalian type. 

The agreement of observed facts with the re¬ 
quirements of theory is here complete, minute, 
and specific; and Professor Huxley may well say 
that the history of the descent of the horse from 
a five-toed mammal, as thus demonstrated, sup- 


32 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

plies all that was required to complete the proof 
of the Darwinian theory. The theory not only 
alleges a vera causa , and is not only confirmed by 
the unanimous import of the facts of classification, 
embryology, morphology, distribution, and succes¬ 
sion ; but it has further succeeded in tracing the 
actual origination of one generic type from an¬ 
other, through gradual “descent with modifica¬ 
tions.” And thus, within a score of years from 
its first announcement, the daring hypothesis of 
Mr. Darwin may fairly claim to be regarded as 
one of the established truths of science. 

December , 1876 . 


II. 


MR. MIVART ON DARWINISM. 

It can hardly be said that in this volume 1 
Mr. Mivart has brought any new contribution to 
the discussion of evolution and its consequences, 
though he has succeeded in marshalling together, 
in a goodly phalanx, the various doubts, objec¬ 
tions, and misconceptions with which the question 
has disturbed the peace of his mind. The book 
is so polemic as quite to belie its placid and deco¬ 
rous title. The “ Lessons from Nature ” turn out 
to be a series of eager assaults upon “ Darwinians ” 
and “ Agnostics,” mingled with jeremiads over 
the tendency of the times when such perverted 
thinkers can obtain such extensive following. 
Though it would be unfair to say that there is no 
trace of a disposition to interrogate nature calmly 
and accept the results, yet this disposition is well- 
nigh paralyzed by a strong mental bias towards 
considering facts only in their supposed bearing 

1 Lessons from Nature, as manifested in Mind and Matter. By 
St. George Mivart. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876. 

3 


34 


Darwinism and Other Essays. 

on certain assumed practical needs of theology. 
An evident struggle between theological predispo¬ 
sitions and acquired scientific habits has interfered 
seriously with the author’s balance of mind; and 
the net result is a book by no means commenda¬ 
ble for scientific spirit, though it exhibits praise¬ 
worthy industry, and often considerable ingenuity 
and dialectical skill. 

So far is Mr. Mivart from occupying the posi¬ 
tion of a disinterested student of nature that his 
numerous misrepresentations can be explained 
without necessarily charging him with a conscious 
willingness to be unfair. Sometimes, at least, he 
appears to misrepresent scientific thinkers through 
sheer incapacity to comprehend the motives which 
guide them. Mr. Darwin’s candour, for example, 
in modifying or retracting hasty inferences im¬ 
plies an attitude of mind which our author seems 
quite unable to appreciate. The nature of Mr. 
Darwin’s inquiries involves him in the consider¬ 
ation of thousands of exceedingly complex cases 
of causation, for the unravelling of which a vast 
experience, the most delicate analytic power, and 
a prodigious memory for details are absolutely 
essential. The general sagacity of his conclusions 
shows that Mr. Darwin possesses these qualities in 
a degree rarely, if ever, surpassed by any scientific 


Mr. Mivart on Darwinism . 35 

inquirer; yet once in a while he makes a slip, 
forgets or overlooks some inconspicuous but im¬ 
portant fact, or sets down an inference without 
his customary caution. Ordinary writers in such 
cases too often prefer to stand by what they have 
written, quietly ignoring criticisms that are hard 
to dispose of, very much as Mr. Mivart, in re¬ 
printing his rejoinder to Mr. Chauncey Wright, 
takes care not to inform the reader of the surre¬ 
joinder which came from his powerful antagonist. 
But Mr. Darwin finds it easy to acknowledge 
himself mistaken. His interest in his personal 
reputation for infallibility, and his zeal in behalf 
of the doctrine he is defending, are held in entire 
subordination to the main purpose of getting the 
facts presented as fairly and completely as pos¬ 
sible. This is the true scientific spirit — the 
spirit in which to acquire lessons from nature, 
whether in the world of mind or in the world of 
matter; and when a writer manifests this spirit 
so consistently as Mr. Darwin, he is sure to win 
the respect and confidence of his readers in the 
highest degree. An occasional error goes for lit¬ 
tle when weighed in the scales against entire dis¬ 
interestedness. 

To a disinterested critic all this, one would 
think, should be self-evident. Yet so far is Mr. 


36 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Mivart from recognizing anything of the sort that 
he cites Mr. Darwin’s scrupulous self-corrections 
as evidence of his utter untrustworthiness ! What 
confidence can we place, he asks, in a thinker who 
makes so many hasty inferences ? — overlooking 
the fact that, in daily experience, those who are 
the most rash in forming their opinions are apt to 
be likewise the most indisposed to reconsider 
them. If Mr. Mivart had any genuine sympathy 
with the scientific temper of mind, this particular 
kind of misrepresentation would never have oc¬ 
curred to him. 

Along with this inability to appreciate disinter¬ 
ested thinking, Mr. Mivart has one or two other 
peculiarities which, taken together, give him a 
real genius for twisting things. He is character¬ 
ized by a sort of cantankerousness which prompts 
him to put a controversial aspect on points which 
properly require only a judicial estimate of the 
bearings of circumstances. On the question as 
to just how much effectiveness is to be allowed 
to the principle of natural selection, he approaches 
Mr. Darwin with the air of a lawyer browbeating 
a witness ; and when Mr. Darwin admits that 
formerly his attention was somewhat too exclu¬ 
sively directed toward this cause of the modifi¬ 
cation of species, his belligerent critic cries out 


Mr. Mivart on Darwinism. 37 

that here is “ a change of front in face of the 
enemy! ” 

Further twisting is caused by unintelligent 
study of the subject criticised. Mr. Mivart, for 
example, attributes to the evolutionists the opin¬ 
ion that “virtue and pleasure are synonymous, 
for in root and origin they are identical.” This 
misrepresentation arises from imperfect apprehen¬ 
sion of the fact that, according to the doctrine of 
evolution, differences in kind result from the ac¬ 
cumulation of differences in degree. One might 
as well say that evolutionists consider the work¬ 
ings of Newton’s genius to be identical with re¬ 
flex action, since in its root and origin all mental 
activity was a kind of reflex action. Nay, one 
might as well say that evolutionists consider a 
man indistinguishable from a cuttle-fish, since in 
their root and origin the vertebrate and mollus- 
can types have been proved by Kovalevsky to be 
identical. 

For the rest, Mr. Mivart evinces frequent want 
of sagacity as to the really vital points of the case 
in which he appears as an advocate. He takes 
great pains to show that some savage races have 
degenerated in civilization, and also that the in¬ 
tellectual difference between the lowest men and 
the highest apes far exceeds the structural differ- 


38 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

ence. But this is, after all, a misconception of 
the requirements of the argument; for on the 
one hand the Darwinian theory nowhere requires 
an uninterrupted progress, but rather implies a 
complicated backward and forward movement, of 
which an irregular progress is the differential re¬ 
sult. And as to the second point, it is just one 
of the triumphs of Darwinism, as regards specu¬ 
lative consistency with facts, that it does account 
for the alteration in the series of effects which 
occurs as we approach the origin of mankind. 
For when intelligence has increased pari passu 
with physical advantages up to a certain point, 
the variations in intelligence begin to become 
more valuable than any variations in physical 
constitution, and consequently become predomi¬ 
nantly subject to the operation of natural selec¬ 
tion, to the comparative neglect of purely physi¬ 
cal variations. A change of this sort, if prolonged 
for a sufficient length of time, would go far to ac¬ 
count for the greatness of the mental difference 
between men and apes, as contrasted with the 
smallness of the structural difference. 

That Mr. Mivart should fail to appreciate this 
point, long since suggested by Mr. Wallace, is 
perhaps not to be wondered at, since he reduces 
the inquiry to a mere controversy in which he 


Mr. Mivart on Darwinism. 39 

holds a brief against the Darwinians. What his 
own views may be as to the origin of man he no¬ 
where explicitly states. But, in spite of his hos¬ 
tility to Mr. Darwin and his theories, he takes 
pains to proclaim himself an evolutionist — within 
such limits as a profound study of Suarez and St„ 
Thomas Aquinas may determine. 

December , 1876. 


III. 


DR. BATEMAN ON DARWINISM. 1 

Dr. Bateman’s argument against Darwinism 
is based upon a fallacy which is quite commonly 
shared by those who have failed to comprehend 
the doctrine of evolution. 2 This is the fallacy of 
supposing that the Darwinian theory can be over¬ 
thrown simply by insisting upon the obvious fact 
that the intelligence and acquirements of man are 
enormously — almost incommensurably — greater 
than the intelligence and acquirements of the 
highest apes. As urged in the case of language, 
Dr. Bateman’s argument is not original with 
him, as he seems to suppose ; it has already been 
urged by Max Muller, a writer far more distin¬ 
guished for brilliancy of expression than for pro¬ 
fundity of thought. In substance it consists of 
three propositions: — 

1 Darwinism Tested by Language. By Frederic Bateman, M. D, 
With a Preface by E. M. Goulburn, D. D., Dean of Norwich. Lon¬ 
don. New York : Scribner and Welford. 1878. 

2 On this point see my Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy , 1874, Part II, 
chaps, xxi., xxii. 


Dr. Bateman on Darwinism . 41 

“ 1. That articulate speech is a distinctive at¬ 
tribute of man, and that the ape and lower an¬ 
imals do not possess a trace of it. 

“2. That articulate speech is a universal at¬ 
tribute of man; that all races have a language, or 
the capacity of acquiring it. 

“ 3. The immateriality of the faculty of speech.” 

It is perhaps hardly correct to call this last 
point a “ proposition,” nor is it easy to determine 
precisely its purport or its relevance. We are 
told farther on that, although “a certain normal 
and healthy state of cerebral tissue is necessary 
for the exterior manifestation of the faculty of 
speech,” it by no means follows that speech is 
located in a particular portion of the brain, or is 
the “ result of a certain definite molecular condi¬ 
tion of the cerebral organ.” Of course it does not 
follow; but the conclusion, however interesting 
to phrenologists and materialists, is irrelevant to 
the discussion of the Darwinian theory, or to that 
of the origin of language. In such inquiries all 
that any one needs to know is that the faculty of 
speech implies, among other things, the presence 
of a brain, and whether this “ faculty ” is to be 
called “ immaterial ” or not is quite beside the 
question. 

Our author’s argumentation, it will be rightly 


42 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

inferred, is more or less rambling in character. 
Returning to the two propositions which really 
make up his argument, it is an obvious criticism 
that every sensible Darwinian will concede them 
both without a moment’s hesitation. There is not 
the slightest evidence of the existence of a race of 
men destitute of articulate speech ; and if apes or 
any other animals do possess the slightest trace 
of such an acquisition, it may safely be neglected 
on the principle of de minimis non curat lex} It 
is only Dr. Bateman’s imaginary Darwinian who 
finds it difficult to admit these plain facts. The 
actual supporters of this “ dangerous heresy ” have 
never gone out of their way to detect an historical 
substratum for Reynard or jEsop, or to hunt from 
its obscurity the Leibnitzian story of the Latin¬ 
speaking dog; there are some of them, we fear, 
who would even, on general grounds, cast dis¬ 
credit on the story of Balaam. But if this be 
really the Darwinian state of mind, then Dr. 
Bateman’s work is plainly a case of ignoratio elen - 
chi, or what is otherwise called “ barking up the 
vvrong tree.” 

As regards the process, psychological and phys- 

1 Neglected, or conceded, by the controversialist, I mean: to the 
disinterested student of nature no fact, however small, is really triv. 
ial. 


Dr. Bateman on Darwinism. 43 

iological, by which the faculty of articulate 
speech was acquired by mankind, no thorough 
explanation has yet been offered, either upon the 
Darwinian or upon any other theory. The so- 
called “bow-wow ” or onomatopoetic theory is no 
doubt correct, so far as it goes, as a description 
of facts which have attended the acquisition of 
speech; but it hardly goes to the root of the mat¬ 
ter. The power of enunciating sounds so as to 
communicate ideas and feelings is certainly an art, 
as much as the later acquired powers of writing 
or drawing. For the original acquisition of such 
an art two conditions were requisite — the phys¬ 
iological capacity of the vocal organs for produc¬ 
ing articulate sounds, and the psychological ca¬ 
pacity of abstraction implied in the conception of 
a sign or symbol. There must also have been re¬ 
quired— as underlying the last-named capacity 
— the possession of a certain amount of mental 
flexibility, or inventiveness, or capability of fram¬ 
ing new combinations of ideas. This sort of men¬ 
tal flexibility is found among animals in man 
alone, and in his case it is the accompaniment, 
and probably the result, of an exceptionally long 
period of infancy. The significance of infancy, 
psychologically, is that it is a period during which 
a great number of all-important nervous combina- 


44 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

tions are formed after birth under the influence 
of outward circumstances which slightly vary 
from generation to generation. Where there is 
no infancy, all the most important nervous com¬ 
binations are established before birth, and under 
the unmodified influence of the powerful conserva¬ 
tive tendency of heredity. Where there is an in¬ 
fancy, many important nervous combinations are 
not formed until after birth, and the strictly con¬ 
servative tendency of heredity is liable to be 
modified by the fact that the experience of the 
offspring amid environing circumstances is not 
likely to be precisely the same as that of the par¬ 
ent. The prolongation of infancy, therefore, in¬ 
creases the opportunities for the production of a 
mental type more plastic than that which is wit¬ 
nessed in the lower animals ; it paves the way for 
inventiveness and for progress. It is, further¬ 
more, the increased variety of experience result¬ 
ing from this increased mental plasticity that leads 
to the power of abstraction and generalization — 
the power of marking out and isolating in thought 
the element that is common to different groups of 
phenomena. 

Now, in the first employment of articulated 
words by inchoate man, who had hitherto only 
grunted or howled, the main point to be inter 


Dr. Bateman on Darwinism . 45 

preted psychologically is the inventive turn of 
mind which could establish an association be¬ 
tween a number of vocal sounds and a corre¬ 
sponding number of objects, and which could 
appreciate the utility of such an association in 
facilitating concerted action with one’s fellow- 
creatures ; though, as to the last point, the utility 
would be so enormous that the maintenance of 
the device, when once conceived, could never be 
in doubt. In the origination of language it is 
but the first costly step that requires considera¬ 
tion ; but this step obviously involved no super¬ 
human mystery. It was but an instance — though 
the greatest of all in its consequences — of that 
general psychical plasticity which characterizes 
the only animal which begins life with a consid¬ 
erable proportion of its nervous combinations un¬ 
determined. 

It is not pretended that such considerations 
solve the problem of the origin of speech. They 
nevertheless go far toward putting it into its 
proper position, and indicating the class of in¬ 
quiries with which it must be grouped if it is to 
be treated in that broad philosophical way which 
can alone connect its solution with the fortunes 
of the Darwinian theory. The existence of lan¬ 
guage is not, as Max Miiller’s dicta imply, a fact 


46 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

in the universe that is isolated or sui generis in 
being incapable of scientific explanation. Im¬ 
mense as the fabric of human speech has grown 
to be, it is undoubtedly based on sundry acts of 
discovery or invention — not necessarily very 
conspicuous at the outset — among primeval semi¬ 
human savages. The inventive acts which led to 
the systematic use of vocal sounds for the inter¬ 
change of ideas, like the inventive acts which re¬ 
sulted in bows and arrows and in cookery, are to 
be regarded simply as instances of the general 
increase in psychical plasticity which has been 
the fundamental fact in the genesis of man in¬ 
tellectually. In other words, the existence of 
language is a fact no more wonderful than the 
general superiority of human over simian intelli¬ 
gence ; and when it shall have been shown how 
the rigid mind of an ape might acquire plasticity, 
the problem of the origin of language, along with 
many other problems, will have been, ipso facto , 
more than half solved. 

A great step in this direction was taken by 
Mr. Wallace, when he pointed out that when 
variations in intelligence have become, on the 
whole, more useful to a race of animals than 
variations in physical constitution, then natural 
selection must seize upon the former to the rela. 


Dr. Bateman on Darwinism. 47 

fcive neglect of the latter. This conclusion follows 
inevitably from the theory of natural selection 
as conceived by Mr. Darwin ; and it further fol¬ 
lows, with equal cogency, that when this point is 
reached an entirely new chapter is opened in the 
history of the evolution of life. A race which 
maintains itself by psychical variations can never, 
by natural selection, give rise to a race specifically 
different from itself in a zoological sense. It may 
go on adding increments to its intelligence until 
it evolves Newtons and Beethovens, while its 
physical structure will undergo but slight and 
secondary modifications. Obviously, the first be¬ 
ginning of such a race of creatures, though but a 
slight affair zoologically, was, in the history of 
the world, an event quite incomparable in impor¬ 
tance with any other instance of specific genesis 
that ever occurred. It constituted a new depar¬ 
ture, so to speak, not inferior in value to the first 
beginning of organic life. From Mr. Spencer’s 
researches into the organization of correspond¬ 
ences in the nervous system it follows that the 
general increase of intelligence cannot be carried 
much farther than it has reached in the average 
higher mammalia without necessitating the gene¬ 
sis of infancy. The amount of work to be done 
by the developing nervous system of the offspring, 
in reproducing the various combinations achieved 


48 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

by the parental nervous system, becomes so con¬ 
siderable that it cannot all be performed before 
birth. A considerable and increasing number of 
combinations have to be adjusted after birth; 
and thus arise the phenomena of infancy. Among 
mammalia the point at which this change be¬ 
comes observable lies between the true monkeys 
and the man-like apes. The orang-outang is un¬ 
able to walk until a month old, and its period of 
babyhood lasts considerably longer. 

The establishment of infancy is the most im¬ 
portant among the series of events which resulted 
in the genesis of man. For, on the one hand, the 
prolongation of this period of immaturity had for 
its direct effect the liberation of intelligence from 
the shackles of rigid conservatism by which the 
unchecked influence of heredity had hitherto con¬ 
fined it. On the other hand, as its indirect effect, 
the prolongation of the period of helplessness 
served to inaugurate social life by establishing 
the family, and thus prepared the way for the 
development of the moral sense. It is by follow¬ 
ing out this line of inquiry that we shall elucidate 
the question of the causes of man’s enormous in¬ 
tellectual superiority over his nearest zoological 
congeners. Meanwhile, and until further light 
shall have been thrown upon such incidental 
questions as the inventiveness displayed in the 


Dr. Bateman on Darwinism. 49 

origin of language, the Darwinian is in no wise 
debarred, by any logical necessity of his position, 
from fully recognizing the fact of this enormous 
superiority. Writers like Dr. Bateman argue as 
if they supposed Darwinians to be in the habit 
of depicting the human race as a parcel of naked, 
howling troglodytes. They “ point with pride ” 
to Parthenons and Iliads, and ask us to produce 
from his African forests some gorilla who can 
perform the like. These worthy critics should 
first try to grasp the meaning of the contrast, 
that while zoologically man presents differences 
from the higher catarrhine apes that are barely 
of generic value, on the other hand the psycholog¬ 
ical difference is so great as, in Mr. Mivart’s 
emphatic language, to transcend the difference 
between an ape and a blade of grass. After 
duly reflecting on this, with the aid to be derived 
from Mr. Wallace’s suggestion above cited, they 
will perhaps be able to comprehend how it is that 
the Darwinian, without ignoring the immensity 
of this difference, seeks, nevertheless, by working 
hypotheses to bring it out of the region of bar¬ 
ren mystery into that of scientific interpretation. 
When they have once got this through their 
heads, such trash as Dr. Bateman’s will no longer 
get published. 

November, 1878. 


IV. 


DR. BUCHNER ON DARWINISM. 1 

The words “materialist” and “atheist” have 
been so long employed as death-dealing epithets 
in the hands of hard-hitting theological controver¬ 
sialists that it seems hardly kind in us to begin 
the notice of a somewhat meritorious book by 
saying that it is the work of a materialist and an 
atheist. We are reassured, however, by the re¬ 
flection that these are just the titles which the 
author himself delights in claiming. Dr. Buch¬ 
ner would regard it as a slur upon his mental fit¬ 
ness for philosophizing if we were to refuse him 
the title of atheist; and “ materialism ” is the 
name of that which is as dear to him as “ liberty ” 
was dear to the followers of Danton and Mirabeau. 
Accordingly, in applying these terms to Dr. Biich- 
ner, they become divested of their old opprobri¬ 
ousness, and are enabled to discharge the proper 

1 Man in the Past , Present, and Future. A Popular Account oj 
the Results of Recent Scientific Research as regards the Origin, Posi¬ 
tion, and Prospects of the Human Race. From the German of Dr. L. 
Buchner, by W. S. Dallas, F. L. S. London, 1872. 


Dr. Buchner on Darwinism. 51 

function of descriptive epithets by serving as ab¬ 
stract symbols for certain closely allied inodes of 
thinking. Considered in this purely philosoph¬ 
ical way, an 44 atheist ” is one to whom the time- 
honoured notion of Deity has become a meaning¬ 
less and empty notion; and a 44 materialist ” is 
one who regards the story of the universe as com¬ 
pletely and satisfactorily told when it is wholly 
told in terms of matter and motion, without ref¬ 
erence to any ultimate underlying Existence, of 
which matter and motion are only the phenome¬ 
nal manifestations. To Dr. Buchner’s mind the 
criticism of the various historic conceptions of 
godhood has not only stripped these conceptions 
of their anthropomorphic vestments, but has left 
them destitute of any validity or solid content 
whatever; and in similar wise he is satisfied with 
describing the operations of nature, alike in the 
physical and psychical worlds, as merely the re¬ 
distributions of matter and motion, without seek¬ 
ing to answer the inquiry as to what matter and 
motion are, or how they can be supposed to exist 
as such at all, save in reference to the mind by 
which they are cognized. 

Starting, then, upon this twofold basis, — that 
the notion of God is a figment, and that matter in 
motion is the only real existence, — Dr. Biichner 


52 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

seeks in the present work to interpret the facts 
disclosed by scientific induction concerning the 
origin of man, his psychical nature, his history, and 
his destiny as a denizen of the earth. With ref¬ 
erence to these topics Dr. BUchner is a follower of 
Mr. Darwin, especially of Mr. Darwin as amended 
by Professor Haeckel. His book, considered on 
its scientific merits only, and without regard to 
its philosophic bearings, is a popular exposition 
of the Darwinian theory as applied to the origin 
of the human race. Regarded simply as a sci¬ 
entific exposition, conducted on these fundamen¬ 
tal principles, there is in the book little which 
calls for criticism. Dr. Buchner has studied the 
Darwinian theory very thoroughly, and his state¬ 
ments in illustration of it are for the most part 
very accurate, showing, so far as this portion of 
the work is concerned, the evidences of a truly 
scientific spirit. He is as lucid, moreover, as 
Taine or Haeckel, and nothing is wanting to one’s 
entire enjoyment of his book, save that modesty 
in the presence of the limitless workings of nature 
in which Dr. Buchner is far more deficient than 
even Taine or Haeckel. 

But from the scientific point of view it is not 
necessary for us to discuss Dr. Buchner’s book, as 
it is not an original scientific treatise, but only a 


Dr. Buchner on Darwinism. 53 

lucid exposition of the speculations and discover¬ 
ies of other students of nature. When we have 
described it as in the main lucid and accurate, we 
have given it all the praise which as a scientific 
exposition it can legitimately claim to have earned. 
When we consider it as a contribution to philoso¬ 
phy, when we ask the question whether it can be 
of any use to us in solving the great problem of 
our relations to the universe in which we live and 
move and have our being, we must set down quite 
another verdict. As an exposition of Darwinism, 
the work, though by no means all that could be 
desired, is still an admirable work. But as a vin¬ 
dication of the atheistic and materialistic way of 
explaining the universe, it is an utter failure. To 
suppose that the establishment of the Darwinian 
theory of man’s origin is equivalent to the vin¬ 
dication of materialism and atheism is a mistake 
of Dr. Buchner’s which would be very absurd 
were it not so very serious. Mr. Darwin’s theory 
only supposes that a certain aggregate of phe¬ 
nomena now existing has had for its antecedent a 
certain other and different aggregate of phenom¬ 
ena. The entire victory of this theory will only 
— like the previous victory of Newton’s theory 
over the doctrine of guiding angels, espoused even 
by Kepler — assure us that in the entire series of 


54 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

phenomenal manifestations of which the world is 
made up there is no miraculous break, no con- 
juring, no freak of the magician. And to this 
conclusion all modern scientific inquiry has long 
been leading us. It needed no Dr. Buchner to 
tell us this. 

All this, however, cannot stir us one inch to¬ 
ward the philosophic doctrine of which Dr. Buch¬ 
ner is the advocate. Dr. Buchner shares with 
the theologians whom he combats the error of 
supposing that godhood cannot be manifested in 
a regular series of phenomena, but only in fortui¬ 
tous miraculous surprises. When he has proved 
that mankind was originated through 'the ordi¬ 
nary processes of paternity from some lower form 
of life, he thinks he has overturned the belief in 
God, whereas he has really only overturned a 
crude and barbarous conception of the way in 
which God acts. And so when it is shown that 
all the phenomena of the world can be explained 
in conformity to a doctrine of evolution which 
originated in the study of material phenomena, 
our author thinks that the ground-theorem of ma¬ 
terialism is forever established ; quite forgetting 
that what we call material phenomena are, after 
all said and done, nothing but expressions for cer¬ 
tain changes occurring in a complicated series of 
psychical states. 


Dr. Buchner on Darwinism. 55 

In short, no matter how far the scientific inter¬ 
pretation of nature may be carried, it can reveal 
to us only the fact that the workings of the ulti¬ 
mate Existence of which Nature is the phenome¬ 
nal expression are different from what they were 
supposed to be by uninstructed thinkers of former 
times. And no matter how far we may carry the 
interpretation of natural phenomena in terms of 
matter and motion, we cannot escape the conclu¬ 
sion that matter and motion, as phenomenal man¬ 
ifestations, can have no genuine existence save as 
the correlatives of a cognizing mind. To treat 
of the universe of phenomena without the nou- 
menon God is nonsense ; and likewise to treat of 
matter (a congeries of attributes) without refer¬ 
ence to the mind in whose cognizance alone can 
attributes have any existence is also nonsense. 
However praiseworthy, therefore, Dr. Buchner’s 
book may be as an exposition of a particular set 
of scientific doctrines, we think it can have but 
small value as a contribution to philosophy. Its 
author is one of those men who see very distinctly 
what they really see, but who in reality see but a 
very little way before them. 


November , 1872. 


V. 


A CRUMB FOR THE “MODERN SYMPOSIUM.” 

No one to whom the question of man’s destiny 
is a matter of grave speculative concern can have 
read, without serious and solemn interest, the dis¬ 
cussion lately called forth in England by Mr. 
Frederic Harrison’s essay on “The Soul and Fu¬ 
ture Life.” 1 In no way, perhaps, could the dark¬ 
ness of incomprehensibility which enshrouds the 
problem be more thoroughly demonstrated than 
by the candid presentation of so many diverse 
views by ten writers of very different degrees of 
philosophic profundity, but all of them able and 
fair-minded, and all of them actuated — each in 
his own way—by a spirit of religious faith. This 
last clause will no doubt seem startling, if not 
paradoxical, to many who have not yet come to 
realize how true it is that there is often more real 
faith in honest scepticism than in languid or tim- 

1 “A Modern Sjnnposium,” The Nineteenth Century, 1877, i. 623y 
832; ii. 329, 497. The articles are all reproduced in America, in The 
Popular Science Monthly Supplement , Nos. 1, 2, 6, and 7, and have 
been published in book form at Toronto, Canada. 1878. 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 57 

orous assent to a half-understood creed. But no 
paradox is intended. I believe that there is as 
much of the true essence of religion — the spirit 
of trust in God that has ever borne men triumph¬ 
antly through the perplexities and woes of the 
world, and the possession of which, in some de¬ 
gree, by most of its members, is the chief differ¬ 
ential attribute of the human race — I believe 
that there is as much of this spirit exhibited in 
the remarks of Professor Huxley as in those of 
Lord Blachford. In the serenity of mood with 
which the great scientific sceptic awaits the end, 
whatever it may prove to he; in the unflinching 
integrity with which his intellect refuses to enter¬ 
tain theories that do not seem properly accred¬ 
ited ; in the glorious energy with which, accepting 
the world as it is, he performs with all his might 
and main the good work for which he is by na¬ 
ture fitted — in all this I can see the evidence of 
a trust in God no less real than that which makes 
it possible for his noble Christian friend to “ be¬ 
lieve because he is told.” I am sure that I un¬ 
derstand Professor Huxley’s attitude; I think I 
understand Lord Blachford’s, also; and it seems 
to me that the difference between the two atti¬ 
tudes, wide as it is, is still a purely intellectual 
difference. It has its root in differently blended 


58 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

capacities of judgment and insight, and in no 
wise fundamentally affects the religious charac¬ 
ter. 

It will be well for the world when this lesson 
has been thoroughly learned, so as to leave no 
further room for misapprehension. That great 
progress has already been made in learning it we 
need no other proof than the mere existence of 
this “ Modern Symposium ” on the subject of a 
future life. Three centuries ago it would have 
been in strict accordance with propriety for the 
ten disputants to have adjourned their symposium 
to some ecclesiastical court, preparatory to a final 
settlement at Smithfield. One century ago there 
would have been wholesale vituperation, attended 
with more or less imputation of unworthy mo¬ 
tives, and very likely there would have been some 
Jesuitical paltering with truth. To-day, however, 
the tremendous question is discussed on all sides 
— alike by Protestant and Catholic, by transcen¬ 
dentalism sceptic, and positivist — with evident 
candour and praiseworthy courtesy ; for, in spite 
of Professor Huxley’s keen-edged wit and Mr. 
Harrison’s fervent heat, there is no one so fortu¬ 
nate as to know these gentlemen who does not 
know that manly tenderness and good feeling 
are by no means incompatible with the ability 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 59 

to exchange good hard blows in a fair English 
fight. 

It is with some diffidence that I venture to add 
my voice to a conversation carried on by such 
accomplished speakers, but the present seems to 
be a proper occasion for calling attention to some 
of the misconceptions which ordinarily cluster 
around the treatment of questions relating to the 
soul and a future life. In thus entering upon the 
discussion, I do not feel called upon to defend any 
particular solution of the main question at issue. 
Going by the “ light of Nature ” alone — to use 
the old-fashioned phrase — it will be generally 
conceded that the problem of a future life is so 
abstruse and complicated that one is quite excus¬ 
able for refraining from a dogmatic treatment of 
it. Nay, one is not only excusable, one is morally 
bound not to dogmatize unless one has a firmer 
basis to stand on than any of us are likely to 
find for some time to come. We may entertain 
hypotheses in private, but we are hardly entitled 
to urge them upon our friends until we feel as¬ 
sured, in the first place, that we have duly fath¬ 
omed the conditions requisite for a rational treat¬ 
ment of the problem. 

It would appear that some of the participators 
in the “ Modern Symposium ” have not sufficiently 


60 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

heeded this obvious maxim of philosophic cau¬ 
tion. Loose talk about “ materialism ” is apt to 
imply loose thinking as to the manner in which 
the metaphysical relations of body and soul are 
to be apprehended. Perhaps Mr. Harrison, as a 
positivist, will say that he has nothing to do with 
apprehending the metaphysical relations between 
body and soul; but, however that may be, there 
is some laxity of thought exhibited in charging 
Professor Huxley with “ materialism ” because 
he speaks of “ building up a physical theory of 
moral phenomena.” To try to explain conscience, 
with metaphysical strictness, as a result of the 
grouping of material molecules, is something 
which I am sure Professor Huxley would never 
think of doing; but, unless I am entirely mis¬ 
taken on this point, there is no ground for Mr. 
Harrison’s charge of materialism. 

To see Professor Huxley charged with mate¬ 
rialism, and in a reproachful tone withal, by a 
positivist who does not acknowledge the existence 
of a soul, save in some extremely Pickwickian 
sense, is a strange, not to say comical, spectacle. 
“ What next ? ” one is inclined to ask. Positivists 
are apt to have, indeed, an ecclesiastical style of 
expression, and one would almost think, from 
his manner, that Mr. Harrison was making com- 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 61 

mon cause with theologians. Into the explana¬ 
tion of this curious phenomenon I cannot here 
profitably enter. The reasons for it are some¬ 
what recondite, and are subtly linked with the 
general incapacity, under which positivists seem 
to labour, of understanding the real import of the 
doctrine of evolution. However this may be, the 
impression that the group of opinions represented 
by Mr. Spencer and Professor Huxley are ma¬ 
terialistic is so widely spread that it is worth 
our while to spend a few moments in ascertaining 
what materialism is, and how far it is involved 
in recent scientific speculations. Is the present 
drift of scientific thought really setting toward 
materialism, or is it not ? 

No epithets are more familiarly used nowadays 
than “ materialism ” and “ materialist,” but their 
ordinary function is vituperative rather than log¬ 
ical. As vague terms of abuse they are hurled 
about with a zeal that may be praiseworthy, but 
with an indiscreetness that is scarcely commend¬ 
able, being aimed, as often as not, at the heads 
of writers who doubt or deny the substantial ex¬ 
istence of matter altogether! Such blunders 
show (among other things) how difficult meta¬ 
physical studies are, and indicate that a little 
more care expended upon analysis and definition 


62 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

would not be thrown away. It is true that some¬ 
thing has already been said upon this point — 
enough, one would think, to obviate the necessity 
of turning back to slay the resuscitated ghosts of 
thrice-slaughtered misconceptions. On the char¬ 
acter of materialism as a philosophical hypothesis, 
Mr. Spencer has been tolerably explicit. Pro¬ 
fessor Huxley has summed up the case with his 
customary felicity, at the close of that famous 
Edinburgh lecture which everybody is supposed 
to have read. 1 In my work on “ Cosmic Philoso¬ 
phy,” I have devoted a very plain-spoken chapter 
to the subject. Nevertheless, as Mr. Freeman 
says, it is not a bad plan, when you have once got 
hold of a truth, to keep hammering it into peo¬ 
ple’s heads on all occasions, even at the risk of 
being voted a tedious bore or a victim of crotch¬ 
ets. We live in a hurried and not over-intelli¬ 
gent world, wherein the wariest of us do not 
always pay due heed to what we are told, and 
the keenest do not always divine its sense; but, 
after we have heard it repeated fifty times that 
Alfred was an Englishman, and Charles the Great 
was not a Frenchman, we may perhaps succeed 
in waking up to the historical import of such 
statements. In this pithy though somewhat cyn- 

1 “The Phj'sical Basis of Life,” Lay Sei'mons, p. 160. 


A Crumb for the u Modern Symposium 68 

ical suggestion I shall seek an excuse for recur¬ 
ring here to what I have said more than once 
already. 1 

From one point of view materialism may be 
characterized as a system of opinions based on the 
assumption that matter is the only real existence. 
On this view the phenomena of conscious intelli¬ 
gence are supposed to be explicable, as momentary 
results of fleeting collocations of material parti¬ 
cles, as when a discharge between two or more 
cells of grey cerebral tissue is accompanied by 
what we call a thought. It requires but little 
effort to see that materialism, as thus defined, 
does not comport well with the most advanced 
philosophy of our time. Materialism of this sort 
has plenty of defenders, no doubt, but not among 
those who are skilled in philosophy. The un¬ 
trained thinker, who believes that the group of 
phenomena constituting the table on which he is 
writing has an objective existence independent of 
consciousness, will probably find no difliculty in 
accepting this sort of materialism. If he is de¬ 
voted to the study of nervous physiology, he will 
be very likely to adopt some such crude notion, 
and to proclaim it as zealously as if it were a very 
important truth, calculated to promote, in many 

1 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy , ii. 79, 432-451. The Unseen World, 

41 , 53 . 


64 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

ways, the welfare of mankind. The science of 
such a writer is very likely to be sound and valu¬ 
able, and what he tells us about woorara-poison 
and frogs’ legs, and acute mania, will probably be 
worthy of serious attention. But with his philos¬ 
ophy it is quite otherwise. When he has pro¬ 
ceeded as far in subjective analysis as he has in 
the study of nerves, our materialist will find that 
it was demonstrated, a century ago, that the group 
of phenomena constituting the table has no real 
existence whatever in a philosophical sense. For 
by “ reality ” in philosophy is meant “ persistence 
irrespective of particular conditions,” and the 
group of phenomena constituting a table persists 
only in so far as it is held together in cognition. 
Take away the cognizing mind, and the colour, 
form, position, and hardness of the table — all the 
attributes, in short, that characterize it as matter 
— at once disappear. That something remains 
we may grant, but this something is unknown and 
unknowable : it is certainly not the group of phe¬ 
nomena constituting the table. Apart from con¬ 
sciousness there are no such things as colour, form, 
position, or hardness, and there is no such thing 
as matter. This great truth, established by 
Berkeley, is the very foundation of modern scien¬ 
tific philosophy; and, though it has been misap- 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 65 

prehended by many, no one has ever refuted it, 
and it is not likely that any one ever will. Con¬ 
cerning the value of Berkeley’s idealism, when 
taken with all its ontological implications, there 
is plenty of room for disagreement; but his psy¬ 
chological analysis of the relation of consciousness 
to the external world is of such fundamental im¬ 
portance that, until one has mastered it, one has 
no right to speak on philosophical questions. It 
is not unfair to say that materialists, as a rule, 
have not mastered the Berkeleian psychology, or 
given much attention to it. In general, their at¬ 
tention has been too much occupied with fila¬ 
ments and ganglia, to the neglect of that close 
subjective analysis which they unwisely stigmatize 
as dreamy metaphysic. Hence, on the whole, 
materialism does not represent anything of pri¬ 
mary importance in modern philosophy; it repre¬ 
sents rather the crude speculation of that large 
and increasing number of people who have ac¬ 
quired some knowledge of the truths of physical 
science, without possessing sufficient subtlety to 
apprehend their metaphysical bearings. Biichner, 
the favorite spokesman of this class of people, 
occupies a position precisely similar to that of 
Lamettrie in the last century, and will, no doubt, 
in the days of our grandchildren be as thoroughly 


66 Darwinism and Other JEssays, 

forgotten as his predecessor, while the same bar¬ 
ren platitudes will be echoed by some new writer 
in the scientific phraseology then current. 

But there is another way of looking at material¬ 
ism which makes it for a moment seem important, 
and which serves to explain, though not to justify, 
the alarm with which many excellent people con¬ 
template the progress of modern science. A con¬ 
spicuous characteristic of materialism is the en¬ 
deavour to interpret mind as a product — as the 
transient result of a certain specific aggregation 
of matter. To a person familiar with post-Berke- 
leian psychology it seems clear that such an en¬ 
deavour is quite hopeless, and that no such in¬ 
terpretation of mind can ever be made. But a 
multitude of very respectable readers, who are 
not so profoundly conversant with metaphysics as 
Spencer and Huxley, have taken it into their 
heads that the doctrine of evolution is advancing 
with rapid strides towards just such an interpre¬ 
tation of mind; and hence it is quite common to 
allude to Spencer and Huxley as “ materialists,” 
which, to my mind, is very much as if one were 
to allude to Mr. Wendell Phillips as a distin¬ 
guished pro-slavery orator. 

The mistake, however, is not unnatural when 
we consider its causes. In point of fact the ter. 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium” 67 

minology of science is thoroughly materialistic, 
though probably not more so than the language 
of ordinary discourse. It is intensely material¬ 
istic for us to speak of the table as if it had some 
objective existence, independent of a cognizing 
mind; and yet, in common parlance, we invari¬ 
ably allude to the table in terms which imply or 
suggest such an independent existence. Just so 
in theoretical science. In describing the develop¬ 
ment of life upon the earth’s surface, when we 
say that consciousness appeared on the scene pari 
passu with the appearance of nervous systems, it 
is not strange if we are supposed to mean that 
consciousness is somehow produced by a peculiar 
arrangement of nervous tissue — that “spirit” is 
in some way or other evolved from “ matter.” 

In reality, however, nothing of the kind is in¬ 
tended. Laxity of speech is mainly responsible 
for the misapprehension. The evolutionist, in 
describing the course of life upon the earth, is 
simply imparting to us, so far as he is able, a 
piece of historical information. Through various 
complex and indirect processes of inference, he 
has become capable of telling us, with some prob¬ 
ability, how things would have looked to us in 
the remote past if we had been there to see. He 
tells us that if we had been on hand in palaeozoic 


68 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

ages we should not have seen the phenomena of 
consciousness manifested in connection with a 
fragment of porphyry, or a handful of sand, or a 
tree-fern, any more than we see such things to¬ 
day, but only in connection with animals endowed 
with nerves. In thus extending the results of 
present experience to the past, the element of 
sequence in time is introduced in such a way as 
to suggest the causation of consciousness by nerve- 
matter. Nevertheless, the assertion of the evolu¬ 
tionist is purely historical in its import, and in¬ 
cludes no hypothesis whatever as to the ultimate 
origin of consciousness; least of all is it intended 
to imply that consciousness was evolved from mat¬ 
ter. It is not only inconceivable how mind should 
have been produced from matter, but it is incon¬ 
ceivable that it should have been produced from 
matter, unless matter possessed already the attri¬ 
butes of mind in embryo, — an alternative which 
it is difficult to invest with any real meaning. The 
problem is altogether too abstruse to be solved 
with our present resources. But it is curious to 
hear honest theologians gravely urging against 
Mr. Spencer that you cannot obtain mind from 
the “primordial fire-mist” unless the germs of 
mind were somehow present already. I hope I 
am not accrediting Mr. Spencer with any opinion 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 69 

he does not hold, and I speak subject to correc¬ 
tion ; but, if my memory serves me, I have more 
than once heard him in conversation urging this 
very objection to any materialistic interpretation 
of evolution. His wonderfully subtle chapter on 
“ The Substance of Mind ” 1 contains, as I under¬ 
stand it, the same argument; but it is easy to 
miss an author’s meaning sometimes when the 
point expounded is so formidably abstract and 
general. 

Be this as it may, we are not helped much by 
supposing the germs of mind to have been some¬ 
how latent in the primeval nebula. The notion 
is too vague to be of any use. The only point on 
which we can be clear is that no mere collocation 
of material atoms could ever have evolved the 
phenomena of consciousness. Beyond this we can¬ 
not go. We are confronted with an insoluble 
metaphysical problem. Of the origin of mind we 
can give no scientific account, but only an histor¬ 
ical one. We can say when (i. e ., in connection 
with what material circumstances) mind came 
upon the scene of evolution; but we can neither 
say whence , nor how , nor why. In just the same 

l Principles of Psychology , second edition, ii. 145-162. [On refer¬ 
ring this point to Mr. Spencer, he desires me to add that I am quite 
correct in my recollection of his conversations and in my interpreta' 
tion of his position.] 


70 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

way we see to-day that mind appears in connec¬ 
tion with certain material circumstances, but we 
cannot see how or why it is so. Least of all can 
we say that the material circumstances produce 
mind; on the contrary, we can assert most pos¬ 
itively that they do not. 

The proof of this rather dogmatic assertion is 
to be found in the careful study of that very doc¬ 
trine of the “ correlation of forces ” which superfi¬ 
cial materialists have exultingly claimed as their 
own, and which their superficial opponents have 
foolishly conceded to them. We have been wont 
to hear this doctrine — the crowning achievement 
of modern science — decried as lending support to 
materialism. If this were really so, we anti-ma¬ 
terialists would have a poor case, for the doctrine 
in question is established beyond all possibility of 
refutation. But it is not really so. On the con¬ 
trary, the final and irretrievable discomfiture of 
materialism follows as a direct corollary from the 
discovery of the correlation of forces. 

By the loose phrase, “ correlation of forces,” 
what is strictly meant is the transformation of 
one kind of motion into another kind. What 
used to be called the “physical forces” — such as 
light, heat, magnetism, and electricity — are now 
known to be peculiar kinds of motion among the 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 71 

imperceptible molecules of which perceptible bod¬ 
ies are composed. The discovery of the “ correla¬ 
tion of forces ” was the discovery of the fact that 
any one of these kinds of molecular motion is con¬ 
stantly liable to be transformed into any one of 
the other kinds, or, now and then, into the molar 
♦ motion of a perceptible body. Heat is all the 
time being converted into light, or into electric¬ 
ity, or into the peculiar kind of undulatory mo¬ 
tion known as “ nerve-force ” — and vice versa. 
And the law of the correlation is that, when any 
one of these species of motion appears, an equiva¬ 
lent amount of some other species disappears in 
producing it. Throughout the world the sum-to¬ 
tal of motion is ever the same, but its distribution 
into heat-waves, light-waves, nerve-waves, etc., 
varies from moment to moment. 

Let us now apply these principles to the case of 
an organism such as the human body. All of the 
“ force ” — i. e ., capacity of motion — present at 
any moment in the human body is derived from the 
food that we eat and the air that we breathe. As 
food is turned into oxygenated blood and assimi¬ 
lated with the various tissues of the body — which 
themselves represent previously-assimilated food 
— the molecular movements of the food-material 
become variously combined into molecular move- 


72 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

ments in tissue — in muscular tissue, in adipose, 
in cellular, and in nerve tissue, and so on. Every 
undulation that takes place among the molecules 
of a nerve represents some simpler form of molec¬ 
ular motion contained in food that has been as¬ 
similated; and, for every given quantity of the 
former kind of motion that appears, an equivalent 
quantity of the latter kind disappears in producing 
it. And so we may go on, keeping the account 
strictly balanced, until we reach the peculiar dis¬ 
charge of undulatory motion between cerebral 
ganglia that uniformly accompanies a feeling or 
state of consciousness. 

What now occurs? Along with this peculiar 
form of undulatory motion there occurs a feeling 
— the primary element of a thought or of an 
emotion. But does the motion produce the feel¬ 
ing, in the same sense that heat produces light ? 
Does a given quantity of motion disappear, to be 
replaced by an equivalent quantity of feeling ? 
By no means. The nerve-motion, in disappear¬ 
ing, is simply distributed into other nerve-mo¬ 
tions in various parts of the body, and these other 
nerve-motions, in their turn, become variously 
metamorphosed into motions of contraction in 
muscles, motions of secretion in glands, motions 
of assimilation in tissues generally, or into yet 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium 73 

other nerve-motions. Nowhere is there such a 
thing as the metamorphosis of motion into feeling 
or of feeling into motion. 

Of course I do not mean that the circuit, as thus 
described, has ever been experimentally traced, or 
that it can be experimentally traced. What I 
mean is that, if the law of the “correlation of 
forces ” is to be applied at all to the physical pro¬ 
cesses which go on within the living organism, w6 
are of necessity bound to render our whole ac¬ 
count in terms of motion that can be quanti¬ 
tatively measured. Once admit into the circuit 
of metamorphosis some element — such as feel¬ 
ing— that does not allow of quantitative meas¬ 
urement, and the correlation can no longer be es¬ 
tablished ; we are landed at once in absurdity and 
contradiction. So far as the correlation of forces 
has anything to do with it, the entire circle of 
transmutation, from the lowest physico-chemical 
motion all the way up to the highest nerve-motion 
and all the way down again to the low T est physico¬ 
chemical motion, must be described in physical 
terms, and no account whatever can be taken of 
any such thing as feeling or consciousness. 

On such grounds as these I maintain that feel¬ 
ing is not a product of nerve-motion in anything 
like the sense that 'light is sometimes a product 


74 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

of heat, or that friction-electricity is a product of 
sensible motion. Instead of entering into the dy¬ 
namic circuit of correlated physical motions, the 
phenomena of consciousness stand outside as ut¬ 
terly alien and disparate phenomena. They stand 
outside, but uniformly parallel to that segment 
of the circuit which consists of neural undula¬ 
tions. The relation between what goes on in con¬ 
sciousness and what goes on simultaneously in the 
nervous system may best be described as a re¬ 
lation of uniform concomitance. I agree with 
Professor Huxley and Mr. Harrison that along 
with every act of consciousness there goes a mo¬ 
lecular change in the substance of the brain, in¬ 
volving a waste of tissue. This is not materialism, 
nor does it alter a whit the position in which we 
were left by common sense before nervous physi- 
ology was ever heard of. Everybody knows that, 
so long as we live on the earth, the activity of 
mind as a whole is accompanied by the activity 
of brain as a whole. What nervous physiology 
teaches is simply that each particular mental act 
is accompanied by a particular cerebral act. In 
proving this, the two sets of phenomena, mental 
and physical, are reduced each to its lowest terms, 
but not a step is taken toward confounding the 
one set with the other. On the contrary, the 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 75 

keener our analysis, the more clearly does it ap¬ 
pear that the two can never be confounded. The 
relation of concomitance between them remains 
an ultimate and insoluble mystery. 

I believe, therefore, that modern scientific phi¬ 
losophy, as represented by Spencer and Huxley, 
not only affords no support to materialism, but 
condemns it utterly, and drives it off the field 
altogether. I believe it is even clearer to-day 
than it was in the time of Descartes that no 
possible analytic legerdemain can ever translate 
thought into extension, or extension into thought. 
The antithesis is of God’s own making, and no 
wit of man can undo it. 

The bearing of these arguments upon the ques¬ 
tion of a future life may be very briefly stated. 
So far as I can judge, I should say that, among 
highly-educated people, the belief in a continu¬ 
ance of conscious existence after death has visibly 
weakened during the present century. I infer 
this as much from the timorousness of conserva¬ 
tive thinkers as from the aggressiveness of their 
radical opponents. In so far as this weakening 
of belief is due to an imperfect apprehension of 
the scientific discoveries which our age has wit¬ 
nessed in such bewildering rapidity, a word of 
caution may not be out of place. For all that 


76 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

physiological psychology has achieved there is no 
more ground for doubt as to a future life to-day 
than there was in the time of Descartes : what¬ 
ever grounds of belief were really valid then are 
equally valid now. The belief has never been 
one which could be maintained on scientific 
grounds. For science is but the codification of 
experience, and it is helpless without the data 
which experience furnishes. Now, science may 
easily demolish materialism and show that mind 
cannot be regarded as a product of matter, but 
the belief in a future life requires something more 
than this for its support. It requires evidence 
that the phenomena we class as mental can sub¬ 
sist apart from the phenomena we class as mate¬ 
rial ; and such evidence, of course, cannot be fur¬ 
nished by science. It cannot be furnished until 
we have had some actual experimental knowledge 
of soul as dissociated from body, and under the 
conditions of the present life no such knowledge 
can possibly be obtained. 

But this undoubted fact has a twofold import. 
While on the one hand it shuts us off from all 
scientific proof of immortality, on the other hand 
it shows that the absence of scientific proof affords 
no valid ground for a negative conclusion. If soul 
can exist when dissociated from body, we have no 


A Crumb for the “ Modern Symposium .” 77 

means of apprehending the fact; and therefore 
our inability to apprehend it does not entitle us 
to deny that soul may have some such indepen¬ 
dent existence. We cannot allow the materialist 
even this crumb of consolation, — that, although 
he cannot prove that consciousness ceases with 
death, nevertheless the presumption is with him 
and the burden of proof upon his antagonists. 
Scientifically speaking, there is no presumption 
either way, and there is no burden of proof on 
either side. The question is simply one which 
science cannot touch. In the future, as in the 
past, I have no doubt it will be provisionally an¬ 
swered in different ways by different minds, on 
an estimate of what is called “moral probabil¬ 
ity/’ just as we see it diversely answered in the 
“ Modern Symposium.” 

For my own part, I should be much better sat¬ 
isfied with an affirmative answer, 1 as affording 
perhaps some unforeseen solution to the general 
mystery of life. I have no sympathy with those 
who stigmatize the hope of immortal life as selfish 
or degrading, and with Mr. Harrison’s proffered 
substitute I confess I have no patience whatever. 
This travesty of Christianity by Positivism seems 

1 For a more complete expression of my view of the case see The 
Destiny of Alan , pp. 108-119. 


78 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

to me, as it does to Professor Huxley, a very 
sorry business. On the other hand, I cannot 
agree with those who consider a dogmatic belief 
in another life essential to the proper discharge 
of our duty in this. Though we may not know 
what is to come hereafter, we have at any rate all 
the means of knowledge requisite for making our 
present lives pure and beautiful. It was Jeho¬ 
vah’s cherished servant who declared in Holy 
Writ that his faith was stronger than death. 
There is something overwhelming in the thought 
that all our rich stores of spiritual acquisition 
may at any moment perish with us. But the 
wise man will cheerfully order his life, undaunted 
by the metaphysical snares that beset him; learn¬ 
ing and learning afresh, as if all eternity lay be¬ 
fore him — battling steadfastly for the right, as if 
this day were his last. “ Disce ut semper victu - 
rus , vive ut eras moriturus” 


December , 1877 


VI. 


CHAUNCEY WEIGHT . 1 

The sudden and untimely death of Mr. Chaun- 
cey Wright, in September, 1875, was an irrepara¬ 
ble loss not only to the friends whose privilege it 
had been to know so wise and amiable a man, but 
to the interests of sound philosophy in general. 
To some, perhaps, there may seem to be extrava¬ 
gance in speaking of any such loss to philosophy 
as irreparable; for in the great work of the world 
we are accustomed to see the ranks close up as 
heroes fall by the way, and when we come to 
reckon up the sum of actual achievement, in our 
thankfulness over the calculable results obtained 
we seldom take heed of those innumerable unre¬ 
alized possibilities upon which in the nature of 
things we can place no just estimate. Of course 
it is right, as it is inevitable, that this should be 
so. There is, however, a point of view from which 

l Philosophical Discussions . By Chauncey Wright. With a Bio¬ 
graphical Sketch of the Author by Charles Eliot Norton. New York: 
Henry Holt & Co. 1876. 


80 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

it may be fairly urged that the work which rare 
and original minds fall short of doing because of 
straitened circumstances or brevity of life does 
never really get done at all. Something like it 
gets performed, no doubt, but it gets performed 
in a different order of causation ; and though 
there may be an appearance of equivalence, the 
fact remains that, from the sum of human striv¬ 
ing, an indefinite amount of rich and fruitful life 
has been lost. True as this is in the case of ex¬ 
act science, it is still more obviously true in spec¬ 
ulative science or philosophy. For the work of a 
philosopher, like the work of an artist, is the pe¬ 
culiar product of endless complexities of individ¬ 
ual character. His mental tone, his shades of 
prejudice, his method of thought, are often of 
as much interest and value to mankind as any of 
the theories which he may devise; and thus it not 
seldom happens that personal familiarity with the 
philosopher is itself a most instructive lesson in 
philosophy. 

In the case of Chauncey Wright, none save the 
friends who knew the rich treasures of his mind 
as shown in familiar conversation are likely to 
realize how great is the loss which philosophy has 
sustained in his death. For not only was he 
somewhat deficient in the literary knack of ex. 


81 


Chauncey Wright . 

pressing his thoughts in language generally intel¬ 
ligible and interesting, but he was also singularly 
devoid of the literary ambition which leads one 
to seek to influence the public by written expo¬ 
sition. Had he possessed more of this kind of 
ambition, perhaps the requisite knack would not 
have been wanting; for Mr. Wright was by no 
means deficient in clearness of thought or in 
command of language. The difficulty — or, if 
we prefer so to call it, the esoteric character — of 
his writings was due rather to the sheer extent of 
their richness and originality. His essays and 
review-articles were pregnant with valuable sug¬ 
gestions, which he was wont to emphasize so 
slightly that their significance might easily pass 
unheeded ; and such subtle suggestions made so 
large a part of his philosophical style that, if any 
of them chanced to be overlooked by tne reader, 
the point and bearing of the entire argument was 
liable to be misapprehended. His sentences often 
abounded in terse allusive clauses or epithets 
which were unintelligible for want of a sufficient 
clue to the subject-matter of the allusion: in the 
absence of an exhaustive acquaintance with the 
contents of the author s mind, the reader could 
only wonder, and miss the point of the incidental 
remark. Of such sort of obscure, though preg' 


82 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

nant, allusions we have an instance in the use 
made of the conception of a “ spherical intelli¬ 
gence ” in the essay on “ The Evolution of Self- 
Consciousness,” where the brief reference to the 
Platonic Timaios is by no means sufficient to re¬ 
lieve the strain upon the reader’s attention. It is 
this too compact suggestiveness which makes this 
remarkable essay so hard to understand, and the 
exuberance of which half tempted Mr. Wright to 
give to the paper the very esoteric title of “ The 
Cognition of Cogito .” A writer who kept the 
public in his mind would not proceed in this way, 
but would more often give pages luminous with 
concrete illustrations where Mr. Wright only 
gave sentences cumbrous with epigrammatic 
terseness. If Mr. Wright did not keep the pub¬ 
lic in mind while writing, it was not from the 
pride of knowledge, for no feeling could have 
been more foreign to him; and there was some¬ 
thing almost touching in the endless patience 
with which he would strive in conversation to 
make abstruse matters clear to ordinary minds. 
It was because, as a writer, he thought in solilo¬ 
quy, using his pen to note down the course of 
his reasoning, but failing to realize the difficulty 
which others might find in apprehending the nu¬ 
merous and far-reaching connotations of phrases 
to him entirely familiar. 


83 


Chauncey Wright. 

It was only some such circumstances as these, 
joined to a kind of mental inertness which made 
some unusually strong incentive needful to any 
prolonged attempt at literary self-exposition, that 
prevented Chauncey Wright from taking rank, in 
public estimation, among the foremost philoso¬ 
phers of our time. An intellect more powerful 
from its happy union of acuteness with sobriety 
has probably not yet been seen in America. In 
these respects he reminds one of Mr. Mill, whom 
he so warmly admired. Though immeasurably 
inferior to Mill in extent of literary acquirement, 
he was hardly inferior to him in penetrating and 
fertile ingenuity, while in native soberness or 
balance of mind it seems to me that Wright was, 
on the whole, the superior. In reading Mr. 
Mill’s greater works, one is constantly impressed 
with the admirable thoroughness with which the 
author’s faculties are disciplined. Inflexible in¬ 
tellectual honesty is there accompanied by sleep¬ 
less vigilance against fallacy or prejudice; and 
while generous emotion often kindles a warmth of 
expression, yet the jurisdiction of feeling is sel¬ 
dom allowed to encroach upon that of reason. 
Nevertheless there are numerous little signs which 
give one the impression that this wonderful equi¬ 
poise of mind did not come by nature altogether, 


84 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

but was in great part the result of consummate 
training, — of unremitting watchfulness over self. 
Some of his smaller political writings and the 
“ Autobiography ” entirely confirm this impres¬ 
sion, and show that in Mr. Mill’s mind there were 
not only immense enthusiasms, but even a slight 
tinge of mysticism. All the more praiseworthy 
seems his remarkable self-discipline in view of 
such circumstances. 

Mr. Wright, though so nearly in harmony with 
Mr. Mill in methods and conclusions, was very 
different in native mental temperament. An 
illustration of the difference is furnished by the 
striking remarks in which Mr. Mill acknowledges 
— in common with his father — a preference for 
the experience-philosophy on utilitarian grounds: 
it obliges men to try their beliefs by tests that 
are perpetually subject to criticism, and thus 
affords no room for doctrines which, by reason of 
some presumed sanctity, men may find an excuse 
for trying to impose on one another. That there 
is profound truth in this no one can deny; but 
prejudice and partisanship are liable to grow out 
of any such practical preference for a given form 
of philosophy, and one cannot readily imagine 
Mr. Wright as influenced, even slightly, in his 
philosophic attitude by such a consideration of 


85 


Cliauncey Wright . 

utility. His opinions were determined only by 
direct evidence, and to this he always accorded a 
hospitable reception. A mind more placid in its 
working, more unalloyed by emotional prejudice 
or less solicited by the various temptations of 
speculation, I have never known. Judicial can¬ 
dour and rectitude of inference were with him 
inborn. On many points his judgment might 
need further enlightenment, but it stood in no 
need of a rectifying impulse. No craving for 
speculative consistency, or what Comte would 
have called “ unity ” of doctrine, ever hindered 
him from giving due weight to opposing, or even 
seemingly incompatible, considerations. For, in 
view of the largeness and complexity of the uni¬ 
verse, he realized how treacherous the most plau¬ 
sible generalizations are liable to prove when a 
vast area of facts is to be covered, and how great 
is the value of seemingly incongruous facts in 
prompting us to revise or amend our first-formed 
theories. 

With these mental characteristics Mr. Wright 
seems to have been fitted for the work of sceptical 
criticism, or for the discovery and illustration of 
specific truths, rather than for the elaboration of 
a general system of philosophy. As our very 
sources of mental strength in one direction may 


86 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

become sources of mental weakness in another, as 
we are very likely to have what the French would 
call “ the defects of our excellences,” so we 
may, perhaps, count it as a weakness, or at least 
a limitation, in Mr. Wright that he was some 
what over-suspicious of all attempts at construct¬ 
ing ideally coherent and comprehensive systems. 
That there is coherency throughout the processes 
of Nature he would certainly have admitted, in so 
far as belief in the universality of causation is to 
be construed as such an admission. But that 
there is any such discernible coherency in the re¬ 
sults of causation as would admit of description 
in a grand series of all-embracing generalizations, 
I think he would have doubted or denied. Such 
denial or doubt seems, at least, to be implied in 
his frequent condemnation of cosmic or synthetic 
systems of philosophy as metaphysical “ anticipa¬ 
tions of Nature,” incompatible with the true spirit 
of Baconism. The denial or doubt would have 
referred, perhaps, not so much to the probable 
constitution of Nature as to the possibilities of 
human knowledge. He would have argued that 
the stupendous group of events which we call the 
universe consists so largely of unexplored, or even 
unsuspected, phenomena that the only safe gen¬ 
eralizations we can make concerning it must needs 


Chauncey Wright. 87 

be eminently fragmentary; and if any one had 
asked whether, after all, we have not great reason 
to believe that throughout the length and breadth 
and duration of the boundless and endless uni¬ 
verse there is an all-pervading coherency of ac¬ 
tion, such as would be implied in the theorem 
that all Nature is the manifestation of one In¬ 
finite Power,—to any such question he would 
probably have held that no legitimate answer can 
be given. 

In this general way of looking at things we have 
the explanation of Mr. Wright’s persistent hostil¬ 
ity to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. This 
hostility is declared in his earliest essay, entitled 
“A Physical Theory of the Universe,” and it is 
maintained in the paper on u German Darwinism,” 
published only three days before his death, where¬ 
in great pains are taken to show that Mr. Spen¬ 
cer’s philosophy is utterly un-Baconian and un¬ 
scientific, as resting, not upon inductive inquiry, 
but upon “ undemonstrated beliefs assumed to be 
axiomatic and irresistible.” In the first and last 
of my many conversations with Mr. Wright — in 
July, 1862, and in July, 1875 — I found myself 
charged with the defence of Mr. Spencer’s phi¬ 
losophy against what then seemed, and still seems, 
to me a profound misunderstanding of its true 


88 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

character and purpose. As the point is one which 
goes as far as any other toward illustrating Mr. 
Wright’s philosophic position, and as it has an 
immediate bearing on the vexed question of sci¬ 
ence and religion, I will crave the reader’s in¬ 
dulgence while I illustrate it briefly here. 

Doctors are proverbially known to disagree, 
whether they be doctors in philosophy or in med¬ 
icine ; but I have often thought that an interest¬ 
ing case might be made out by any one who 
should endeavour to signalize the half-hidden as¬ 
pects of agreement rather than the conspicuous 
aspects of difference among philosophic schools. 
Certainly, in the controversy which has been 
waged of late years concerning the sources of 
knowledge and the criterion of truth, one is in¬ 
clined to suspect that a greater amount of antag¬ 
onism has been brought to the surface than is 
altogether required by the circumstances. In old 
times, when you were asked why you believed 
that things would happen in future after much 
the same general fashion as in the past, there 
were two replies which you could make. If you 
were a believer in Locke, you would say that you 
trusted in the testimony of experience; but here 
the follower of Leibnitz would declare that you 
were very unwise, since experience can only tes* 


89 


Chauncey Wright . 

tify to what has happened already, and, so far as 
experience goes, you have n’t an iota of warrant 
for your belief that the sun will rise to-morrow 
morning. Your trust in the constancy of Nature 
must be derived, therefore, from some principle 
inherent in the very constitution of your mind, 
implanted there by the Creator for a wise and 
beneficent purpose. 

Once this transcendentalist argument was 
thought to have great weight, but of late years 
it has fallen irredeemably into discredit. For to¬ 
day the empiricist retorts with crushing effect 
that, precisely because we are wholly dependent 
on experience, and have no other quarter to go to 
for rules of belief and conduct, we cannot apply 
to the future any other rules of probability than 
those with which our experience of the past has 
furnished us. If we had any criterion of belief 
independent of experience, then we might perhaps 
be able to believe that on the earth a million 
years hence, or on Mars to-day, a piece of red-hot 
iron would not burn the hand. Were we not 
strictly hampered by experience, we might doubt 
the universality of causation. But being thus 
strictly hampered, we must either imagine the 
future under the same rules as those under which 
we remember the past, or else subside in a kind 


90 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

of mental chaos and form no expectations what¬ 
ever. To this view of the case transcendentalism 
has as yet made no satisfactory rejoinder. 

Our faith in the constancy of Nature results, 
therefore, from our inability to overcome or “go 
behind ” the certified testimony of experience. 
Such is the primary psychological fact, about 
which there is no reason to suppose that Mr. 
Wright and Mr. Spencer would disagree. But 
this, like many other facts, has two sides; or at 
least, there are two possible ways of interpreting 
it, and here arises the misunderstanding. On the 
one hand, our belief in the constancy of Nature 
may be the result of an immense induction or 
counting up of the whole series of events which 
show that Nature is not capricious ; or, on the 
other hand, it may be the generalization of a sim¬ 
ple assumption which we make in every act of 
experience, and without which we could not carry 
on any thinking whatever. The first alternative 
is the one defended by Mr. Wright in common 
with Mr. Mill, while the second is the one more 
prominently insisted upon by Mr. Spencer. To 
me it seems that Mr. Spencer’s view is very much 
the more profound and satisfactory; but I fail to 
see that there is necessarily any such practical 
antagonism between the two as is implied in re. 


91 


Chauncey Wright. 

cent controversies on the subject. On the other 
hand, it seems clear to me that the two views are 
simply two complementary or obverse aspects of 
the same fundamental truth. 

At first sight it may seem very bold to assert 
that in every act of our mental lives we make 
such a grand assumption as that of the constancy 
of Nature; but it is very certain that, in some 
form or other, we do keep making this assump¬ 
tion. Every time that the grocer weighs a pound 
of sugar and exchanges it for a piece of silver, the 
practical validity of the transaction rests upon 
the assumption that the same lump of iron will 
not counterbalance one quantity of sugar to-day 
and a different quantity to-morrow ; and a similar 
assumption of constancy in weight and exchange¬ 
ability is made regarding the silver. The inde¬ 
structibility of matter and the continuity or per¬ 
sistence of force are taken for granted, though 
neither the grocer nor his customer may have re¬ 
ceived enough mental training to understand these 
axioms when stated in abstract form. Nay, more, 
though they may be superstitious men, believing 
in a world full of sprites and goblins; though 
they may be so ignorant as to suppose that, when 
wood is burned and water dried up, some portions 
of matter are annihilated, — yet in each of these 


92 Darwinism and Other JEssays . 

little practical transactions of life they go upon 
the same assumption that the philosopher goes 
upon when, with his wider knowledge and deeper 
insight, he rules out the goblins and declares that 
no matter is ever destroyed. Without this as- 
sumption in some form we could not carry on the 
work of life for a single day. The assumption, 
moreover, is absolutely unconditional; no occur¬ 
rence ever shakes our reliance upon it. I set my 
clock to-day, and depend on its testimony to-mor¬ 
row in starting on a journey: if I miss the train, 
I may conclude that the clock was not well regu¬ 
lated, or that it has begun to need cleaning; but 
it never occurs to me that my confidence in the 
mechanical laws of cog-wheels and pendulums has 
been at all misplaced. 

This universal and unqualified assumption of 
the constancy of Nature is, in a certain sense, a 
net result of experience, inasmuch as we find it 
tested and verified in every act of our conscious 
lives. Acting on the principle that “ a pound is 
a pound, all the world around,” we find that our 
mental operations harmonize with outward facts. 
Doubt it, if we could, and our mental operations 
would forthwith tumble into chaos. Experience, 
therefore, — by which is meant our daily inter¬ 
course with outward facts, — continually forces 


93 


Chauncey Wright . 

upon us this assumption. Along with whatever 
else we are taught about ourselves and the world, 
there comes as part and parcel the ever-repeated 
lesson that the order of Nature may be relied on. 
In this sense the belief may be said to be a net 
result of all our experience. 

But this is by no means an adequate account 
of the matter. The case has another aspect, to 
which neither Mr. Mill nor Mr. Wright has done 
justice. How can the constancy of Nature be 
said to be proved by experience, when we begin 
by assuming it in each of the single acts of expe¬ 
rience which, taken together, are said to prove 
it ? Does not this look like reasoning in a circle ? 
We are told that the constancy of Nature is proved 
for us by an unbroken series of experiences, be¬ 
ginning with our birth and ending with our death; 
and yet not one of this series of experiences can 
have any validity, or indeed any existence, unless 
the constancy of Nature be tacitly assumed to 
begin with. It is the balance, we are told, which 
assures us that no particle of matter is ever lost; 
but in weighing things in a balance we must take 
it for granted that the earth’s gravitative force is 
uniform, — is not one thing to-day and another 
to-morrow; nay, we must also assume that the 
present testimony of our senses will continue to 


94 Darwinism and Other. Essays. 

be consistent in principle with their past testi¬ 
mony. Whatever system of forces we estimate 
or measure in support of our implicit belief in the 
constancy of Nature, we must sooner or later ap¬ 
peal to some fundamental unit of measurement 
which is invariable. Without some such constant 
unit we cannot prove that the order of Nature is 
uniform : but we cannot prove the constancy of 
such a unit without referring it to some other 
unit, and so on forever; while to assume the con¬ 
stancy of such a unit is simply to assume the 
whole case. 

It would seem, therefore, that our belief in the 
trustworthiness of Nature is not properly described 
when it is treated simply as a vast induction. It 
should rather be regarded as a postulate indispen¬ 
sable to the carrying on of rational thought, — a 
postulate ratified in every act of experience, but 
without which no act of experience can have any 
validity or meaning. It is for taking this view of 
the case that Mr. Spencer is charged with rearing 
a system of philosophy upon “ undemonstrable 
beliefs assumed to be axiomatic and irresistible.” 
Considering that the undemonstrable belief in 
question is simply the belief in the constancy of 
Nature, one would be at a loss to see what there 
is so very heinous in Mr. Spencer’s proceeding, 


Chauncey Wright. 95 

were it not obvious that we have here struck 
upon a grave misconception on the part of Mr. 
Wright. Misled, no doubt, by some ambiguity 
of expression, Mr. Wright supposed Mr. Spencer 
to be laying down some everlasting principle of 
universal objective validity, and quite indepen¬ 
dent of experience. To do this would undoubt¬ 
edly be to desert science for metaphysics; but 
Mr. Spencer has not done anything of the kind. 
As I said before, there has probably been an ex¬ 
cess of controversy on this point. For my own 
part, without retreating from any position for¬ 
merly taken, 1 I should be willing, for all practi¬ 
cal purposes, to waive the question altogether. 
Whether our belief in the uniformity of Nature 
be a primary datum for rational thinking or a net 
result of all induction, or whether, with the au¬ 
thors of the “Unseen Universe,” we prefer to 
call it an expression of trust that the Deity “ will 
not put us to permanent intellectual confusion,” 
— whichever alternative we adopt, our theories 
of the universe will be pretty much the same in 
the end, provided we content ourselves with a 
simple scientific coordination of the phenomena 
before us. And this is all that has been aimed 

1 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Part I., chap. iii.; Part II., chaps. 


96 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

at in the attempt to construct a synthetic, or cos¬ 
mic, system of philosophy. There has been no 
further transcending of experience than is implied 
in the assumption that the order of Nature is the 
same in the Pleiades and in the Solar System 
until we learn to the contrary ; and it would be 
difficult to set aside Mr. Spencer’s proceedings as 
un-Baconian without so drawing the line as to 
exclude Newton’s comparison of the falling moon 
to the falling apple, — the grand achievement 
which first extended the known dynamic order of 
Nature from the earth to the heavens. 

Our knowledge of the universe is no doubt 
well-nigh infinitely small, — how small we can¬ 
not know. The butterfly sailing on the summer 
breeze may be no farther from comprehending 
the secular changes in the earth’s orbit than man 
is from fathoming the real course and direction of 
cosmic events. Yet if throughout the tiny area 
which alone we have partially explored we every¬ 
where find coherency of causation, then, just be¬ 
cause we are incapable of transcending expe¬ 
rience, we cannot avoid attributing further co¬ 
herency to the regions beyond our ken, so far as 
such regions can afford occasion for thought at all. 
The very limitations under which thinking is con¬ 
ducted thus urge us to seek the One in the Many; 


97 


(Jhauncey Wright. 

yet, if our words are rightly weighed, this does 
not imply a striving after “ systematic omnis¬ 
cience,” nor can any theistic conception which 
confines itself within these limits of inference be 
properly stigmatized as contrary to the spirit of 
science. 

One of the most marked features of Mr. 
Wright’s style of thinking was his insuperable 
aversion to all forms of teleology. As an able 
critic in “ The Nation” observes, to Mr. Wright 
“ such ideas as optimism or pessimism were alike 
irrelevant. Whereas most men’s interest in a 
thought is proportional to its possible relation to 
human destiny, with him it was almost the re¬ 
verse.” But the antagonism went even deeper 
than this. Not only did he condemn the shallow 
teleology of Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, 
but any theory which seemed to imply a discern¬ 
ible direction or tendency in the career of the 
universe became to him at once an object of sus¬ 
picion. As he was inclined to doubt or deny any 
ultimate coherency among cosmical events, he 
was of course indisposed to admit that such events 
are working together toward any assignable re¬ 
sult whatever. From his peculiar point of view 
it seemed more appropriate to look upon phe- 
drifting and eddying about in ar 
7 


nomena as 


98 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

utterly blind and irrational manner, though now 
and then evolving, as if by accident, temporary 
combinations which have to us a rational appear¬ 
ance. “ Cosmical weather ” was the tersely allu¬ 
sive phrase with which he was wont to describe 
this purposeless play of events, as if to liken the 
formation and dissipation of worlds to the ca¬ 
pricious changes of the wind. So strong a hold 
had this notion acquired in his mind that for 
once it warped his estimate of scientific evidence, 
and led him to throw aside the well-grounded 
nebular hypothesis in favour of the ill-conceived 
and unsupported meteoric theory of Mayer. In 
Mr. Wright’s mind it was an insuperable objec¬ 
tion to the nebular hypothesis that it seems to 
take the world from a definable beginning to a 
definable end, and such dramatic consistency, he 
argued, is not to be found amid the actual turmoil 
of Nature’s workings. It would be improbable, 
he thought, that things should happen so prettily 
as the hypothesis asserts: in point of fact, Nature 
does so many things to disconcert our ingenious 
formulas! To the general doctrine of evolution, 
of which the nebular hypothesis is a part, Mr. 
Wright urged the same comprehensive objection. 
The dramatic interest of the doctrine, which gives 
it its chief attraction to many minds, was to Mr. 


99 


Chauncey Wright. 

Wright primd facie evidence of its unscientific 
character. The events of the universe have no 
orderly progression like the scenes of a well-con¬ 
structed plot, but in the manner of their coming 
and going they constitute simply a “ cosmical 
weather.” 

Without pausing over the question whether 
dramatic completeness belongs properly to meta¬ 
physical theories only, or may sometimes also be 
found in doctrines that rightly lay claim to scien¬ 
tific competence, we may call attention to the in¬ 
teresting fact that Mr. Wright’s objection reveals 
a grave misunderstanding of the true import of 
the doctrine of evolution in general, as well as of 
the nebular hypothesis in particular. The objec¬ 
tion — if it be admitted as an objection — applies 
only to the crude popular notion of the doctrine 
of evolution, that it is all an affair of progress, 
wherein a better state of things (that is, better 
from a human point of view) keeps continually 
supplanting a less excellent state, and so on for¬ 
ever, or at least without definite limit. That Mr. 
Wright understood the doctrine in this crude way 
was evident from the manner in which he was 
wont to urge his anti-teleological objection both in 
his writings and in conversation. In criticizing the 
nebular hypothesis, for instance, he was sure to 


L-OfC. 


100 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

let fall some expression which showed that in his 
mind the hypothesis stood for a presumptuous at¬ 
tempt to go back to the beginning of the universe 
and give some account of its total past career in 
terms of progress. But the nebular hypothesis, 
as it is now held by evolutionists, does not make 
any such attempt at all. The nebular hypothesis 
traces, from indications in the present structure 
of the solar system, the general history of the pro¬ 
cess by which the system arose out of a mass of 
vaporous or nebulous matter. That process has 
been a species of evolution in so far as it has sub¬ 
stituted a determinate and complicated for an in¬ 
determinate and simple arrangement; and in so 
far as it has resulted in the production of the 
earth or whatever other planet may be the abode 
of conscious intelligence, it has been a kind of 
progress judged with reference to human ends. 
But so far from this evolution or progress being 
set down as a universal or eternal affair, it is 
most explicitly regarded as local and temporary. 
Throughout the starry groups analogous changes 
are supposed to be going on, but at different 
stages in different systems, just as the various 
members of a human society coexist in all stages 
of youth, maturity, or decline; while here and 
there are nebulae in which the first steps of devel- 


101 


Chauncey Wright. 

opment have not yet become apparent, and cir¬ 
cumstances can be pointed out under which one 
of these masses might now and then fail to pro¬ 
duce a system of worlds at all. Not only is there 
all this scope for irregular variety, but the theory 
further supposes that in every single instance, but 
at different times in different systems, the process 
of evolution will come to an end, the determinate 
complexity be destroyed, and the dead substance 
of extinct worlds be scattered broadcast through 
space, to serve, perhaps, as the raw material for 
further local and temporary processes of aggrega¬ 
tion and evolution. This view is held as scien¬ 
tifically probable by many who have not been 
helped to it by Mr. Spencer’s general arguments ; 
but whoever will duly study the profound con¬ 
siderations on the rhythm of motion, set forth in 
the rewritten edition of “ First Principles,” will 
see that it is just this endlessly irregular alterna¬ 
tion of progress and retrogression, of epochs of 
life with epochs of decay, which the doctrine of 
evolution asserts as one of its leading theorems. 
In this respect the accepted name of the doctrine, 
though perhaps not unfortunate, is but imper¬ 
fectly descriptive, and is therefore liable to mis¬ 
lead. What the doctrine really maintains is the 
universal rhythmic alternation of evolution and 


102 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

dissolution, only that our attention is pre-emi¬ 
nently attracted to the former aspect of the two¬ 
fold process, as that which is at present upper¬ 
most in our own portion of the universe. In no 
department of Nature, whether in the heavens or 
on the earth, in the constitution of organic life or 
in the career of human society, does the doctrine 
of evolution assert progress as necessary, uni¬ 
versal, and perpetual, but always as a contingent, 
local, and temporary phenomenon. 

But what better phrase could we desire than 
“ cosmical weather ” whereby tersely to describe 
the endlessly diversified and apparently capricious 
course of Nature as it is thus set forth in the doc¬ 
trine of evolution ? As the wind bloweth where 
it listeth, but we know not whence it came, nor 
whither it goes, so in the local condensations and 
rarefactions of cosmical matter which make up 
the giant careers of stellar systems we can detect 
neither source nor direction. Not only is there 
no reference to any end which humanity can rec¬ 
ognise as good or evil, but there is not the slight¬ 
est indication of dramatic progress toward any 
deno'dment whatever. There is simply the never- 
ending onward rush of events, as undiscriminat¬ 
ing, as ruthless, as irresistible, as the current of 
Niagara or the blast of the tropical hurricane. 


Chauncey Wright . 103 

This is a picture which ought to satisfy the 
most inexorable opponent of teleology. For my 
own part, I can see nothing very attractive in it, 
even from a purely speculative point of view, 
though it is as striking a statement as can well 
be made of the meagreness of our knowledge 
when confronted with the immensity of Nature. 
The phrase “ cosmical weather ” happily comports 
with our enormous ignorance of the real tendency 
of events. But as terrestrial weather is after all 
subject to discoverable laws, so to an intelligence 
sufficiently vast the appearance of fickleness in 
“cosmical weather” would no doubt cease, and 
the sequence of events would doubtless begin to 
disclose a dramatic tendency, though whether to¬ 
ward any end appreciable by us or not it would 
be difficult to say. 1 

In the discussion of such questions, called up 
by Mr. Spencer’s philosophy, Mr. Wright always 
appeared in the light of a most consistent and un¬ 
qualified positivist. He hardly could be called a 
follower of Comte, and I doubt if he even knew 
the latter’s works save by hearsay. But he 
needed no lessons from Comte. He was born a 
positivist, and a more complete specimen of the 


1 This point is treated from a far more advanced position in my new 
book, The Idea of God, as affected by Modern Knowledge. 


104 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

positive philosopher has probably never existed. 
He went as far as it was possible for a human 
thinker to go toward a philosophy which should 
take no note of anything beyond the content of 
observed facts. He always kept the razor of 
Occam uncased and ready for use, and was espe¬ 
cially fond of applying it to such entities as “ sub¬ 
stance ” and “ force,” the very names of which, 
he thought, might advantageously be excluded 
from philosophical terminology. Sometimes he 
described himself as a positivist, but more often 
called himself a Lucretian, — the difference be¬ 
tween the two designations being, perhaps, not 
great. As a champion of Lucretius, I remember 
bis once making a sharp attack upon Anaxagoras 
for introducing creative design into the universe 
in order to bring coherence out of chaos. What 
need, he argued, to imagine a supernatural agency 
in order to get rid of primeval chaos, when we 
have no reason to believe that the primeval chaos 
ever had an existence save as a figment of the 
metaphysician! To assume that the present or¬ 
derly system of relations among things ever 
emerged from an antecedent state of disorder is, 
as he justly maintained, a wholly arbitrary and un¬ 
warrantable proceeding. No one could ask for a 
simpler or more incisive criticism upon that crude 


105 


Chauncey Wright . 

species of theism which represents the Deity as a 
power outside the universe which coerces it into 
orderly behaviour. 

Although, like all consistent positivists, Mr. 
Wright waged unceasing war against Mr. Spen¬ 
cer’s system of philosophy, there was yet one por¬ 
tion of the doctrine of evolution which found in 
him a most eminent and efficient defender. In 
spite of his objections to evolution in general, Mr. 
Wright thoroughly appreciated and warmly es¬ 
poused the Darwinian theory of the origin of spe¬ 
cies by “ descent with modifications.” His most 
important literary work was done in elucidation 
and defence of this theory. Of all his writings, 
by far the clearest and most satisfactory to read is 
the review of Mr. Mivart’s “ Genesis of Species,” 
which Mr. Darwin thought it worth while to re¬ 
print and circulate in England. Its acute and 
original illustrations of the Darwinian theory give 
it very great value. The essay on phyllotaxy, 
explaining the origin and uses of the arrange¬ 
ments of leaves in plants, is a contribution of 
very great importance to the theory of natural 
selection. So, too, in a different sense, is the pa¬ 
per on the evolution of self-consciousness, which 
is the most elaborate of Mr. Wright’s productions, 
but so full of his worst faults of style that, even 


106 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

after much cross-questioning of the author, I 
never felt quite sure that I grasped his central 
meaning. 

It was in such detached essays or monographs 
as these that much was to have been expected 
from Mr. Wright, especially in the application of 
Darwinian conceptions to the study of psychol- 
°gy. Could he have been induced to undertake 
an elaborate treatise, we should have seen the 
philosophy of Mill and Bain carried to its furthest 
development and illustrated with Darwinian sug¬ 
gestions by a writer not in sympathy with the 
general doctrine of evolution, — an interesting 
and instructive spectacle. But I doubt if Mr. 
Wright would ever have undertaken an extensive 
work. To sit down and map out a subject for 
systematic exploration would have been a pro¬ 
ceeding wholly foreign to his habits. Once 
launched out on a shoreless sea of speculation, he 
would brood and ponder for weeks, while bright 
determining thoughts would occur to him at seem¬ 
ing haphazard, like the rational combinations of 
phenomena in his theory of u cosmic weather. ” 
To his suggestive and stimulating conversation 
this unsystematic habit gave additional charm. 
An evening’s talk with Mr. Wright always seemed 
to me one of the richest of intellectual entertain- 


107 


Chauncey Wright. 

merits, but there was no telling how or where it 
would end. At two o’clock in the morning he 
would perhaps take his hat and saunter home¬ 
ward with me by way of finishing the subject; 
but on reaching my gate a new suggestion would 
turn us back, — and so we would alternately es¬ 
cort each other home perhaps a dozen times, until 
tired Nature asserted her rights, and the newly 
opening vistas of discussion were regretfully left 
unexplored. 

I never knew an educated man who set so little 
store by mere reading, except Mr. Herbert Spen¬ 
cer ; but, like Mr. Spencer, whom he resembled in 
little else, Mr. Wright had an incomprehensible 
way of absorbing all sorts of knowledge, great 
and small, until the number of diverse subjects on 
which he could instruct even trained specialists 
was quite surprising. There were but few topics 
on which he had not some acute suggestion to 
offer; and with regard to matters of which he 
was absolutely ignorant — such as music — his 
general good sense and his lack of impulsiveness 
prevented his ever talking foolishly. 

This lack of impulsiveness, a kind of physical 
and intellectual inertness, counted for a great deal 
both in his excellences and in his shortcomings. 
His movements were slow and ponderous, his 


108 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

mild blue eye never lighted with any other ex¬ 
pression than placid good humour, and his voice 
never varied its gentle monotony. His absolute 
freedom from egotism made him slow to take of¬ 
fence, and among the many accidents of contro¬ 
versy there was none which could avail to ruffle 
him. The patient deference with which he would 
answer the silly remarks of stupid or conceited 
people was as extraordinary as the untiring in¬ 
terest with which he would seek to make things 
plain to the least cultivated intelligence. This 
kind of patient interest, joined with his sweet¬ 
ness of disposition and winning simplicity of man¬ 
ner, made him a great favourite with children. 
He would amuse and instruct them by the hour 
together with games and stories and conjurer’s 
tricks, in which he had acquired no mean pro- 

Along with this absence of emotional excita¬ 
bility, Mr. Wright was characterized by the ab¬ 
sence of aesthetic impulses or needs. He was 
utterly insensible to music, and but slightly af¬ 
fected by artistic beauty of any sort. Excepting 
his own Sokratic presence, there never was any¬ 
thing attractive about his room, or indeed any¬ 
thing to give it an individual character. In ro¬ 
mance, too, he was equally deficient: after his 


109 


Chauncey Wright. 

first and only journey to Europe, I observed that 
he recalled sundry historic streets of London and 
Paris only as spots where some happy generaliza¬ 
tion had occurred to him. 

But romantic sentiment, aesthetic sensitiveness, 
and passionate emotion,—these are among the 
things which hinder most of us from resting con¬ 
tent with a philosophy which applies the law of 
parsimony so rigorously as to cut away every¬ 
thing except the actuality of observed phenomena. 
In his freedom from all such kinds of extra-ra¬ 
tional solicitation Mr. Wright most completely 
realized the ideal of the positive philosopher. His 
positivism was an affair of temperament as much 
as of conviction; and he illustrates afresh the 
profound truth of Goethe’s remark that a man’s 
philosophy is but the expression of his person¬ 
ality. In his simplicity of life, serenity of mood, 
and freedom from mental or material wants, he 
well exemplified the principles and practice of 
Epikuros ; and he died as peacefully as he had 
lived, — on a summer’s night, sitting at his desk 
with his papers before him. 

It is a bitter thing to lose a thinker of this 
mould, just in the prime vigour of life, and at a 
time when the growing habit of writing seemed 
to be making authorship easier and pleasanter, so 


110 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

that in years to come we were likely to have had 
even richer and brighter thoughts from the pen 
that must now forever lie idle. The general fla¬ 
vour of Mr. Wright’s philosophy — unsystematic, 
but fruitful in hints — may be gathered well 
enough from the papers which Mr. Norton has 
carefully collected in this memorial volume. But 
the best that can now be done in the way of 
editing will give but an inadequate impression of 
Chauncey Wright to those who have not listened 
to his wise and pleasant talk. To have known 
such a man is an experience one cannot forget or 
outlive. To have had him pass away, leaving so 
scanty a* record of what he had it in him to utter, 
is nothing less than a public calamity. 

December , 1876 . 


VII. 


WHAT IS INSPIRATION? 

The word “ inspiration ” furnishes an excellent 
example of the way in which a whole theory of 
the universe may be imbedded in an etymology. 
In its origin the word means a “breathing in,” or 
suggestion from some external source, of thoughts 
not natural to the writer or speaker. The non- 
naturalness of the thought is an essential part of 
the definition, since, if the thought be such as 
would naturally arise, through ordinary logical or 
emotional sequence, in the mind of the writer or 
speaker, there is no reason for referring it to any 
external source. That thoughts often do come 
into the mind unbidden, and apparently without 
any assignable immediate antecedent, is a matter 
of the commonest experience. From the purpose¬ 
less succession of phantasms in idle reverie up 
to the orderly visions of Milton, the melodious 
themes of Beethoven, or even the wonderful 
flashes of insight of Newton or Faraday, we have 
instances of visual or auditory images, or appre- 


112 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

hensions of physical truths, entering and occupy¬ 
ing the foreground of consciousness suddenly and 
without warning. The more valuable and strik¬ 
ing instances of this sort are, in modern parlance, 
described as cases of inspiration, though by this 
phrase no more is now meant than to designate 
some rare or admirable kind of normal mental ac¬ 
tion. The modern student has learned that con¬ 
sciousness has a background as well as a fore¬ 
ground, — that a number of mental processes go 
on within us, of which we cannot always render 
a full and satisfactory account. Many a link of 
association is buried beneath the surface, and the 
coveted flash of memory, of judgment, or of fancy 
does not always come at our bidding. To account 
for this group of phenomena, modern psycholo¬ 
gists have propounded various theories of “ latent 
mental action ” or 44 unconscious cerebration; ” 
but no one now resorts to the hypothesis that 
such phenomena are due to the operation of some 
outside spirit or intelligence acting upon the 
mind. Hypotheses of this sort do not harmonize 
with the accumulated experience of modern times, 
and they have become utterly and hopelessly dis¬ 
credited. 

In ancient times, however, the case was entirely 
different. In one of the most enlightened and 


113 


What is Inspiration ? 

sceptical communities of antiquity we find one of 
the most enlightened and sceptical minds habitu¬ 
ally explaining the suggestions of its own supreme 
common sense by ascribing them to the dictation 
of an indescribable external agency. The daimch 
nion , or familiar warning spirit, of Sokrates shows 
how consonant with the general theories of the 
ancients was the conception of inspiration in its • 
full and literal sense. In the stage of culture 
thus exemplified every bright stroke of genius was 
interpreted as the result of inspiration, though it 
was naturally in cases of supreme practical im¬ 
portance that the interpretation was most forcibly 
felt and most thoroughly believed. The poet’s 
invocation to the Muse was at first no doubt much 
more than a faded metaphor; but it is beyond 
question that men like Isaiah and Mohammed be¬ 
lieved themselves to be mere mouth-pieces of the 
living word of God. 

The belief in inspiration, as thus generally 
cherished in ancient times, seems to have grown 
out of a more primitive belief in possession , which 
is found everywhere current among savage and 
barbarous tribes, and which, until within a few 
generations, has maintained itself even in the 
Christian world. The subject has been treated 
in an elaborate and masterly manner by Mr. Ty- 
8 


114 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

lor in the second volume of his great work on 
“ Primitive Culture.” In the lower stages of cul¬ 
ture, the morbid phenomena of hysteria, epilepsy, 
and mania are explained by the hypothesis of a 
foreign spirit, which is supposed to have taken 
temporary possession of the body or earthly taber¬ 
nacle of the patient. In Christian cases of exor¬ 
cism, this foreign spirit was naturally supposed to 
be of diabolical character; but in the cruder the¬ 
ory of the barbarian no such uncanny suspicion 
is attached to it. On the contrary, the possessed 
person is usually regarded as an exceptionally 
valuable source of information concerning the su¬ 
pernatural world to which the possessing spirit 
belongs. Alike in the medicine-man of the Amer¬ 
ican Indian, and in the Pythian priestess of Del¬ 
phi, may be seen the close theoretical connection 
between disease-possession and oracle-possession. 
The Zulu diviners ascribe their hysterical symp¬ 
toms to possession by “ amatongo,” or ancestral 
spirits ; and the Siberian shamans select epileptic 
children to be educated for the priesthood, which 
is thus “ apt to become hereditary along with the 
epileptic tendencies it belongs to.” In the prim¬ 
itive theory, the diviner or prophet can give in¬ 
formation from the supernatural world because 
his own personality is for the time being sup- 


What is Inspiration? 116 

planted by tbe personality of the foreign spirit 
which has come to dwell in his body. This is 
the theory of oracle-possession, and from this to 
the theory of inspiration, as generally current in 
antiquity, it is evidently but a short step. Instead 
of supplanting the personality of the prophet, the 
foreign spirit has but to be conceived as swaying 
or influencing the prophet’s mind from without, 
and this step is taken ; instead of possession we 
have inspiration. 

Thus in its origin the word “ inspiration ” is 
implicated with a whole theory of the universe, — 
or, to speak more appropriately, with a general 
way of looking at natural phenomena. In the 
lower stages of culture men know nothing of a 
universe, but they contemplate natural phenomena 
as under the capricious direction of innumerable 
ghostly beings similar to men. In most cases, in¬ 
deed, these demons or deities are supposed to be 
the ghosts of ancestral chieftains. The philoso¬ 
phy which interprets Nature in this way is ex¬ 
tremely crude, but it is quite intelligible and con¬ 
sistent with itself; and, when a barbarian speaks 
of his prophet as “ inspired ” by the tutelary de¬ 
ity of the tribe, we know exactly what he means. 
He means that the words are whispered or other¬ 
wise suggested to the prophet by the ghost of 


116 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

some old chief of the tribe ; and, when he himself 
has thoughts, waking or sleeping, which he can¬ 
not readily account for, he thinks that these are 
similarly suggested to him by some ghostly de¬ 
mon or deity. The daimonion of Sokrates was a 
specimen of just this sort of barbaric psychology. 

Now, in modern times and among Christian 
peoples, this primitive philosophy of Nature is 
pretty thoroughly superseded. The tendency of 
modern thought is strongly towards a very strict 
monotheism. An imperfect monotheism had long 
ago driven out the general notion of innumerable 
ghost-deities ; but Christianity arose at a time 
when the primitive philosophy was still very 
strong, and so Christianity has always been more 
or less incrusted with heathen conceptions. In 
recent times, however, the prolonged study of 
physical science has begun to tell powerfully upon 
all our habits of thought; and one effect of this 
is that we have at last really begun to grasp the 
conception of the unity of God, in the only sense 
in which such a conception can have any validity. 
We have begun to conceive of Divine action as 
uniform, incessant, and general, throughout each 
and every region of the universe, however vast or 
however tiny, so that the infinite whole is ani¬ 
mated forever by one immutable principle of 


117 


What is Inspiration ? 

life; and this conception we call, in common par¬ 
lance, the conception of a government of law, and 
not of caprice. So strong has this habit become 
that we look with distrust upon any hypothesis 
which implies a conception of Divine action as in 
any sense local, or special, or transitory. 

The hypothesis of inspiration has been retained 
by modern Protestant Christianity, chiefly as a 
means of accounting for the assumed infallibility 
or supernatural excellence of the literature gath¬ 
ered together in the canonical Scriptures. It is 
supposed that the writers of these works were in 
some way instructed by Divine action, so that 
their works are either entirely true in every state¬ 
ment, or at least may claim to be examined in 
accordance with different canons of criticism from 
those which we feel bound to apply to all other 
works. Now, this hypothesis most certainly im¬ 
plies a conception of Divine action as local, spe¬ 
cial, and transitory; and, in so far as it does this, 
it bears the marks of that heathen mode of philos¬ 
ophizing which was current when Christian mono¬ 
theism arose, and which has incrusted Christianity 
with many of its conceptions. It is obviously not 
an hypothesis in accord with the very strict mono¬ 
theism towards which modern thought is so mani¬ 
festly tending, and it is not likely long to survive 


118 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

unless upheld by very weighty evidence. Such 
evidence might be forthcoming if the various 
books of the Bible had been found able to with¬ 
stand every test of scientific and literary criticism 
that could be brought to bear upon them, and 
come out unscathed in every statement. Such a 
phenomenon would at least have been very re¬ 
markable, but in point of fact the outcome of 
Biblical criticism has been very different from 
this. A century of intense study and searching 
controversy has superabundantly proved that the 
Bible not only contains much that conflicts both 
with modern knowledge and with modern moral¬ 
ity, but that the various parts of it often hope¬ 
lessly contradict each other in matters of fact, and 
sometimes present irreconcilable divergences in 
matters of doctrine, while minor errors of histor¬ 
ical or philological interpretation abound in it 
throughout. In view of such a conclusion there 
would seem to be no need for any hypothesis of 
special Divine action in the composition of the 
Bible. On the contrary, the belief in the peculiar 
inspiration of this collection of books should prob¬ 
ably be regarded as one of the incumbrances with 
which Christianity has been loaded by the old 
heathen way of looking at things. 

A sad incumbrance it certainly is to any one 


119 


What is Inspiration? 

who truly loves and reveres the Bible. To make 
a fetish of the best of books does not, after all, 
seem to be the most reverent way of treating it. 
Take away the discredited hypothesis of infalli¬ 
bility, and the errors of statement and crudities 
of doctrine at once become of no consequence, and 
cease to occupy our attention. It no longer seems 
worth while to write puerile essays to show that 
the Elohist was versed in all the conclusions of 
modern geology, or that the books of Kings and 
Chronicles tell the same story. The spiritual 
import of this wonderful collection of writings 
becomes its most prominent aspect; and, freed 
from the exigencies of a crude philosophy and an 
inane criticism, the Bible becomes once more the 
Book of mankind. 

August , 1878. 


VIII. 


MODERN WITCHCRAFT. 1 

On this most dismal of subjects Dr. Hammond 
has given us a book that is both sensible and en¬ 
tertaining. His survey of so-called “ spiritualis¬ 
tic ” phenomena is extensive, and with a large and 
important part of them his intimate acquaintance 
with abnormal states of the nervous system has 
enabled him to deal very successfully. The re¬ 
sults of a physician’s experience are, moreover, 
very happily supplemented by historical research. 
One of the excellent points about Dr. Hammond’s 
book is its frequent comparison of contemporary 
delusions with those of earlier times. He makes 
such wholesome use of the annals of witchcraft 
and the biographies of mediaeval saints, mystics, 
and charlatans, as fairly entitles his book to a 
prominent place on the Index Expurgatorius. 
The marvels countenanced from time to time by 

l Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous De¬ 
rangement. By W. A. Hammond, M. D. New York: G. P. Put¬ 
nam and Sons. 1876. 


Modern Witchcraft. 121 

the Roman Church fare no better in his hands 
than the wonderful deeds of the Homes and the 
Davenports, and of these it is left doubtful 
whether the most marvellous part is the audacity 
of the performers or the gullibility of the spec¬ 
tators. 

According to Dr. Hammond, spiritualism is for 
the most part barefaced imposture, the remainder 
being innocent delusion. By many persons who 
adopt this view on the whole, yet are unable to 
realize how great is the capacity of the human 
mind for being deceived, a reservation is made in 
behalf of divers phenomena which are alleged to 
take place in conformity to some undiscovered 
“ natural law,” or to require for their explanation 
some species of “ force ” other than those with 
which scientific men are familiar. Dr. Hammond 
is not inclined to admit any such reservation as 
this, which, even if it were allowed, would be of 
small use to the spiritualists. Even if an event 
were admitted to be inexplicable save by an ap¬ 
peal to some “ force ” other than those that have 
hitherto been studied, we should still have no sort 
of reason for assuming any connection between 
this unknown “ force ” and the “ spirits ” of de~ 
ceased persons. Such an assumption could find 
no warrant whatever, save in a general a priori 


122 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

hypothesis, handed down to us from barbarous 
times, which has been uniformly discredited wher¬ 
ever there has been an opportunity for testing it. 
Even to describe such a “ force ” as “ psychic ” is 
to beg the whole question; for until we have sub¬ 
jected it to a long course of experimentation, like 
that which has built up our scientific knowledge 
of heat and light, we can have no means of know¬ 
ing whether it is “ psychic ” or not. 

It is, however, very unphilosophical at the out¬ 
set to appeal to any new or unknown force until 
we have thoroughly exhausted all means of ex¬ 
planation furnishable by forces that have already 
been defined ; and by the advocates of spiritualism 
no such preliminary inquiry has ever been made 
or even attempted. When, therefore, Mr. Crookes 
finds himself unable to explain the way in which 
Mr. Home causes the index of a spring-balance to 
descend without exerting any apparent pressure 
on the lever, it is a very violent stretch of in¬ 
ference to call in an imaginary “ psychic force ” 
by way of simplifying the matter. This is ap¬ 
pealing from the known to the unknown, and it 
is in no such way that discoveries are made in 
those physical sciences which Mr. Crookes has so 
carefully studied. Dr. Hammond may well say 
that “there are so many ways in which known 


Modern Witchcraft . 123 

forces manifest themselves, and so little is known 
of the laws which govern them, that Mr. Crookes 
might, for the present, with safety and propriety, 
have held his opinion in abeyance.” As Mr. 
Crookes’s experiment is the only one cited in 
which the spiritualists seem to have been able to 
work in broad daylight, and to dispense with the 
grosser forms of jugglery, a brief description of it 
may prove instructive. 

In order to test Mr. Home’s pretensions to a 
power of altering the weights of bodies by “ spir¬ 
itual agency,” Mr. Crookes constructed a simple 
and ingenious apparatus “ consisting of a mahog¬ 
any board thirty-six inches long by nine and a 
half inches wide and one inch thick. At one end 
a strip of mahogany was screwed on, forming a 
foot, the length of which equalled the width of 
the board. This end of the board rested on [the 
edge of] a table, while the other end was sup¬ 
ported by a spring-balance ” pendent from a tri¬ 
pod stand. Obviously, now, when Mr. Home 
placed the tips of his fingers lightly on the end of 
the board which was resting on the foot or ful¬ 
crum, the pointer of the balance ought to have 
remained perfectly stationary ; even a heavy pres¬ 
sure directly over the fulcrum could not alter the 
position of the lever. But, as a matter of fact, 


124 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

the pointer descended, showing that the weight 
or downward pull at the end of the lever sup¬ 
ported by the balance had been increased by from 
three to six pounds. In order still further to 
guard against the possibility of Mr. Home’s ex¬ 
erting any muscular action on the board, Mr. 
Crookes placed a glass vessel full of water over 
the centre of the fulcrum, “ and by means of an 
iron stand, quite detached from all the rest of the 
apparatus, a vessel of copper was held so that it 
dipped into the water without touching the sides 
of the glass vessel, the bottom of the copper ves¬ 
sel being perforated with holes, in consequence 
of which it was partially filled with water. . . . 
When Mr. Home placed his hands inside the cop¬ 
per vessel, any force passing through his hands 
had to traverse the water hence no muscular ac¬ 
tion of his could have any effect upon the spring- 
balance. With the apparatus thus arranged, the 
lever oscillated as in his previous experiment, 
the average strain registered being three or four 
pounds.” 

Such were the phenomena to explain which 
Mr. Crookes invoked the assistance of an un¬ 
known something which it pleased his fancy to 
call “ psychic force,” while his companion, Dr. 
Huggins, more wisely declined to express any 


Modern Witchcraft. 125 

opinion. In connection with these phenomena, 
Dr. Hammond calls attention to an experiment 
of Professor Tyndall’s, in which an egg is placed 
in an egg-cup and a long lath balanced upon the 
egg: if a dry stick of sealing-wax, which has been 
well rubbed with a piece of woollen cloth, be held 
over one end of the lath, the latter, no matter 
how heavy, will rise to meet it. In dry weather 
many persons can make the finger serve the same 
purpose as the sealing-wax, by first shuffling their 
feet for a few moments over the carpet. Taking 
these things into consideration, Dr. Hammond 
arranged an apparatus like that of Mr. Crookes, 
and, applying the stick of sealing-wax just over 
the fulcrum, where Mr. Home’s finger-tips had 
rested, the pointer of the balance at once de¬ 
scended. The same result was immediately af¬ 
terwards obtained when, after shuffling over a 
thick rug, Dr. Hammond rested his finger on the 
same place. So far, therefore, the strain on the 
balance would seem to be due neither to ghosts 
of departed men nor to “ psychic force,” but to 
some peculiar manifestation of that commonplace 
agent, friction electricity. How far Dr. Ham¬ 
mond’s experiments may be conclusive, it is not 
in our power to say. What it concerns us to 
notice is that his method of going to work, by 


126 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

searching for some analogous case within the re¬ 
gion of experience, is the method of science and 
common sense, whereas Mr. Crookes’s method, of 
deserting the region of experience in quest of 
some “ psychic force,” is the method which char¬ 
acterizes alike the barbaric myth-maker and the 
ill-trained thinker in a civilized community. So 
long as scientific men are capable of doing such 
unscientific things, it is not to be wondered at 
that primitive superstitions still survive. 

Some of Mr. Home’s other tricks are suggestive 
in another way. The feat of making a small 
table so heavy that the credulous bystander can¬ 
not stir it from the floor shows what curious re¬ 
sults may be obtained from highly impressionable 
people by riveting their attention. Dr. Ham¬ 
mond has himself performed this trick with entire 
success. Taking a small Japanese table, weigh¬ 
ing less than two pounds, he informed a young 
man that he was going to make it too heavy to 
be raised from the floor. For a quarter of an 
hour he held the tips of his fingers on it, until 
the young man’s attention became riveted, when 
he removed his hands and challenged the young 
man to lift the table. It proved immovable, and 
“ I saw,” says our author, “ that so far from 
endeavouring to lift it, as he supposed he was 


Modern Witchcraft. 127 

doing, he was in reality pressing it with all his 
might towards the floor.” But as soon as Dr. 
Hammond had waved his hand over the table 
and declared that it might now be lifted, the 
young man lifted it with ease. Scientifically 
viewed, such phenomena are very interesting; 
they seem closely akin to the phenomena of hyp¬ 
notism in men and animals, so strikingly illus¬ 
trated in the experiments of Kircher and Czer- 
mak. Hens and pigeons can easily be put into 
a cataleptic state by holding a cork or a bit of 
chalk before their eyes so as to attract their at¬ 
tention ; and in a similar way a frog’s attention 
may be so absorbed that his belly may be cut 
open without his seeming to notice it. Mr. Braid 
has similarly hypnotized men; and Dr. Hammond 
produced complete anaesthesia in a lady by caus¬ 
ing her to look for a few moments at a cork 
fastened upon her forehead while her back was 
cauterized with a red-hot iron. 

As for Mr. Home’s tricks of putting live coals 
into his waistcoat pocket and on other people’s 
bald heads with impunity, such things have so 
long been commonplaces with second-rate con¬ 
jurers that it is astonishing to find intelligent 
men like Mr. Wallace quoting them as instances 
of ghostly agency. Nothing could be easier for a 


128 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

clever juggler like Mr. Home than to exchange 
real coals for false ones, or to protect his own 
pockets and the heads of his dupes with asbestos 
cloth, without attracting notice. Such a pro¬ 
ceeding would require far less skill than those of 
professional magicians, like Hermann or Houdin, 
in comparison with whose truly wonderful achieve¬ 
ments the best performances of spiritualists are 
not for a moment worthy to be named. 

Still keeping to Mr. Home, his famous trick of 
“ levitation,” or appearing to float through the air 
out of one third-story window into another, seems 
partly to illustrate the effects of intense expecta¬ 
tion in producing hallucination, partly to show us 
for the thousandth time how little unsifted human 
testimony is worth ; for on one occasion, while 
two “respectable witnesses” were sure that they 
saw the great “ medium ” come sailing feet fore¬ 
most through the window, their less gullible com¬ 
panion was equally positive that the levitating gen¬ 
tleman was ‘sitting quietly in his arm-chair all the 
while ! Nothing is more common than for us to be 
told what people of undoubted veracity have seen. 
For my own part, if I were to answer frankly 
in such cases, I should take my cue from a eele* 
brated naturalist whose friend was recounting to 
him a miraculous shower of frogs from the sky. 


Modern Witchcraft. 129 

“ It is fortunate,” said he, “ that you have seen 
it, for now I can believe it. If I had seen it 
myself, I should not have believed it! ” The 
commonest acts of perception are so liable to be 
warped by hypothesis (a fact which conjurers 
like Houdin consummately understand) that it is 
quite useless to conjecture what our witnesses 
may really have seen, unless we know much more 
than they are likely to tell us of the physical 
and mental conditions under which their seeing 
was done. At a meeting of spiritualists in Bos¬ 
ton, Mr. Robert Dale Owen once saw what he 
took to be an “apparition in shining raiment,” 
being quite clear in his mind that no deception 
or illusion was possible under the circumstances. 
But Dr. Hammond, making a diagram of the 
rooms from data contained in Mr. Owen’s ac¬ 
count, shows that, with the greatest ease, a 
“ woman in white ” might have been brought 
into the room and illuminated by means of a 
dark lantern without awakening suspicion. The 
case of Ang^lique Cottin, the famous “ electric 
girl,” is equally instructive. After tipping tables, 
repelling books, brushes, and other small objects, 
and disturbing magnetic needles before numer¬ 
ous “ intelligent audiences,” her alleged powers 
were carefully investigated by a committee of the 


130 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

Academy of Sciences, consisting of Arago, Bec- 
querel, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and others. Tables, 
books, brushes, and magnetic needles, all kept 
most provokingly quiet, and the “ electric girl ” 
subsided into oblivion. So, numbers of people 
who watched the “Welsh fasting-girl ” were 
quite sure that she subsisted without food; but, 
when really competent watchers were introduced, 
the poor creature died of starvation, destroyed 
by her own obstinacy and the criminal acquies¬ 
cence of her parents. 

We have touched upon but few of the topics 
treated in Dr. Hammond’s book. Into his elab¬ 
orate discussion of the painful and often disgust¬ 
ing phenomena of hysteria, ecstasy, and stigmat¬ 
ization, we have not space to follow him. His 
subject is one which leads the inquirer into some 
of the darkest and most loathsome corners of the 
human mind; but the inquiry has, nevertheless, 
its uses. 


July, 1876. 


IX. 


comte’s positive philosophy. 1 

It is now nearly a quarter of a century since, 
by the publication of the last volume of the 
64 Cours de Philosophie Positive,” Auguste Comte 
completed his great task of organizing into a co¬ 
herent system the doctrines held and the methods 
of investigation pursued by scientific men. His 
work was not long in obtaining the recognition of 
advanced thinkers ; and during the period which 
has elapsed since its completion, its leading views 
— noticed with more or less approval by Mr. Mill, 
Mr. Grote, and Sir G. C. Lewis, explained and 
defended by Mr. Lewes and M. Littr6, partially 
adopted by Mr. Buckle, adversely criticised by 
Mr. Spencer, and violently attacked by the entire 
a priori school of philosophers and theologians — 
have seriously occupied the attention of a large 
part of the thinking public. The term “ positiv¬ 
ism ” has won for itself a place in the vocabulary 

1 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. By John Stuart Mill. 
Boston: William V. Spencer. 1866. 12mo, pp. 182. 


132 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

of philosophy beside the older names “ idealism ” 
and “ scepticism,” as indicating a distinct and im¬ 
portant phase in the development of speculative 
thought. But its more recent introduction into 
philosophic language has not availed to protect it 
from those ambiguities of interpretation which 
envelop, as with a halo, the latter time-honoured 
appellations. On the contrary, so far are most 
persons from having a distinct idea of what they 
mean when they speak of positivism that it is 
not uncommon to hear classed as positivists men 
like Professors Tyndall and Huxley, the peculiar 
tendency of whose opinions has been but slightly, 
if at all, determined by the speculations of M. 
Comte. To call these men positivists is to neces¬ 
sitate such an extension of the term as to include 
all truly scientific investigators of phenomena, 
from the days of Galileo and Newton downwards. 
This vagueness results naturally from the circum¬ 
stance that many of M. Comte’s most prominent 
doctrines did not originate with himself, but were 
held by him in common with many thinkers, both 
of the present and of past ages. Not only as a 
discoverer of new truths, but as an organizer of 
those already discovered, did he announce himself 
to the world. 

At the present time, when such a general inter- 


133 


Comte’s Positive Philosophy . 

est is felt in the philosophy of M. Comte, and 
such a wide-spread curiosity is manifested to know 
in what that philosophy really consists, a work 
like the one now before us is most welcome. Mr. 
Mill is admirably qualified to furnish us with a 
clear and trustworthy exposition of the Positive 
Philosophy. His own researches have led him 
over the same paths which were traversed by M. 
Comte, and the results of his meditations on the 
proper methods to be pursued in scientific explora¬ 
tion were laid before the world nearly a genera¬ 
tion ago, in his “ System of Logic, ” — a work 
which in our opinion is as important a contribu¬ 
tion to human knowledge as the “Philosophie 
Positive ” itself. And while, on the one hand, 
the number of opinions held in common by the 
two, to say nothing of Mr. Mill’s well-known can¬ 
dour, is a sufficient guaranty for the fair treatment 
of the subject, on the other hand, Mr. Mill’s emi¬ 
nence as an original thinker prevents him from 
ever abdicating the position of a critic for that of 
a disciple. 

In common with the majority of scientific think¬ 
ers, M. Comte asserts the universality and inva¬ 
riability of natural laws and he coincides in the 
opinion, held by one great school of psychologists 
since Locke, that all knowledge is derived from 


134 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

experience. But his emphatic and determined 
rejection of the methods of subjective psychology 
leaves him so destitute of the means for establish¬ 
ing this doctrine that it can hardly be regarded 
as a coherent, though doubtless an indispensable, 
portion of his system. Allied to this theorem is 
that of the relativity of all knowledge, which also 
is not peculiar to the Positive Philosophy. It has 
been held with more or less consistency by a vast 
number of thinkers from Protagoras downward, 
including in the list of its adherents many whose 
antagonism on most other points has been unqual¬ 
ified, — men such as Aristotle and Bruno, Aver- 
roes and Bacon, Hume and Kant. In relation to 
this dogma, M. Comte is the natural successor of 
Brown. As Mr. Mill truly remarks, “ the doc¬ 
trine and spirit of Brown’s philosophy are en¬ 
tirely positivist, and no better introduction to 
positivism than the early part of his Lectures has 
yet been produced.” While, curiously enough, 
Brown’s most redoubtable opponent, Sir William 
Hamilton, has also verbally adopted this positive 
theorem, although his simultaneous assertion of 
the principles of Natural Dualism sufficiently 
shows that he never really understood it. Hume 
was probably its first consistent supporter, though 
he often pushes scepticism to the point of denial, 


185 


Comte’s Positive Philosophy. 

apparently maintaining the relativity not only of 
all knowledge, but of all existence likewise. Not 
so M. Comte, who ever implicitly recognizes the 
existence of noumena, while insisting upon their 
eternal banishment to the realm of the Unknow¬ 
able. We should strive, therefore, not to ascer¬ 
tain the causes of phenomena, either primary or 
final, but only to formulate the laws of their co¬ 
existence and sequence. With the study of phe¬ 
nomena as causes, i. e. as invariable antecedents 
of other phenomena, M. Comte has never, as it 
has been foolishly asserted, found fault. His phi¬ 
losophy is entirely concerned with the investiga¬ 
tion of these, in distinction from noumenal causes, 
the origin of phenomena, and the end for which 
they exist. Of this bridge of Time, which man 
and Nature alike are traversing, he forbids us to 
strain our vision in vain efforts to discern the be¬ 
ginning and the end, immersed as they both are 
in the utter darkness of eternity. 

But though M. Comte did not originate the 
doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge, and 
though while ignoring psychologic research he 
can in no wise prove it, he has yet, as Mr. Mill 
observes, made it in a great measure his own doc¬ 
trine by his method of treating it. The first dis¬ 
tinctive feature of his philosophy is the assertion 


136 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

that, in its investigation of nature, the human 
mind has passed through three essentially different 
stages. These are, first, the Theological stage, in 
which all phenomena are viewed as resulting from 
the volitions of supernatural agents ; second, the 
Metaphysical stage, in which phenomena are sup¬ 
posed to be determined by the existence of inher¬ 
ent occult causes; and, third, the Positive stage, in 
which, the search for causes being abandoned, the 
mind rests content with grouping phenomena ac¬ 
cording to their relations of coexistence and suc¬ 
cession. The exposition of this law of intellectual 
development occupies a considerable portion of 
Mr. Mill’s volume, and is, we think, both lucid 
and profound. But we cannot go so far as Mr. 
Mill in accepting the theorem as a true and ad¬ 
equate statement of the course which the human 
mind has pursued. As such a statement, we be¬ 
lieve it to be imperfect and superficial, though 
containing a sufficient amount of truth to have 
made its application to the study of history result 
in sundry minor generalizations of the highest 
value. The “ positive ” method of contemplat¬ 
ing phenomena is doubtless becoming exclusively 
prevalent with scientific explorers ; and for this 
reason, the name “ positivism,” after losing its 
more special connotations, is perhaps destined to 


Comte's Positive Philosophy . 137 

become the designation of scientific thought in 
general. The naturalistic tendencies observable 
in Sokrates and Aristotle, organized by Bacon 
and Descartes, and represented by subsequent dis¬ 
coverers, might thus without inaccuracy be con¬ 
sidered “positive.” 

The second distinctive feature of M. Comte’s 
philosophy is its arrangement of the sciences in 
such an order that those which deal with the most 
general and least complex relations are studied 
prior to those which treat of relations more spe¬ 
cial and involved. M. Comte distinguishes be¬ 
tween the abstract sciences, “which have to do 
with the laws which govern the elementary facts 
of nature,” and the concrete sciences, which “ con¬ 
cern themselves only with the particular com¬ 
binations of phenomena which are found in ex¬ 
istence.” Thus Physics and Chemistry are the 
abstract sciences corresponding to the concrete 
science Mineralogy, while Zoology and Botany 
deal with concrete examples of the abstract laws 
enunciated by Physiology. Leaving the concrete 
sciences out of consideration, M. Comte arranges 
the abstract sciences as follows: I. Mathematics ; 
II. Astronomy; III. Physics (comprising the sci¬ 
ences of Weight, Heat, Sound, Light, and Elec¬ 
tricity) ; IV. Chemistry , V. Biology; and VI. 


138 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Sociology. In the arrangement of the subdivis¬ 
ions of each science, he attempts to apply the 
same principle of advancing from the general to 
the special: thus, in Mathematics, the laws of 
number are to be studied before those of magni¬ 
tude, and these again before those of equilibrium. 
In the arrangement of the different branches of 
Physics, however, this principle evidently fails; 
it being impossible to assert that the phenomena 
of weight and pressure are less general than those 
of heat, or perhaps even those of light. The 
omission of a science of Psychology from the 
above scheme will be deemed by most persons a 
grave defect. Nor can M. Comte be said to have 
at all mended the matter by offering us in its 
stead (we blush to tell it) the wretched substi¬ 
tute Phrenology. In spite of these defects, the 
advantages of studying the sciences in this order 
will be disputed by no one; it being manifest 
that each science furnishes almost indispensable 
aid to the study of its successors, while throwing 
comparatively little light on the subjects treated 
by its predecessors. Each science, too, has meth¬ 
ods of investigation peculiar to itself; and it is 
the elaborate statement of these methods that we 
consider the most permanently valuable of M. 
Comte s contributions to philosophy. But we dd 


Comte's Positive Philosophy. 139 

nor agree with the statement that this admirable 
arrangement of the sciences represents the true 
order of their historic development; and that, 
while each science has experienced successively 
the application of the theological, the metaphysi¬ 
cal, and the positive methods, the order in which 
they have attained the positive stage conforms to 
the order in which they are here placed. We do 
not believe that any serial arrangement can rep¬ 
resent either the true relations of the sciences to 
each other, or the comparative rapidity with which 
they have advanced toward perfection. The sim¬ 
plicity of the phenomena with which they deal 
is far from being the only condition which has 
determined their evolution. And we therefore 
differ from Mr. Mill in thinking that Mr. Spen¬ 
cer has entirely destroyed the pretensions of M. 
Comte’s classification to be considered as founded 
in the nature of things, however valuable it may 
be as a help to study. 

It is on his contributions to our knowledge of 
the laws of social evolution that M. Comte chiefly 
prides himself. He claims the right to be called 
the founder and legislator of the science of soci¬ 
ety. We are not among the number of those who 
are disposed to grant him this lofty title. We do 
not even think that the science of society, as a 


140 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

systematic whole, can yet be said to exist. Much 
has indeed been done to prepare the way for sucii 
a science. Some subordinate discoveries of ines. 
timable value have been made, and it has been 
conclusively shown that social phenomena are 
proper objects of scientific treatment. Among 
the pioneers of this new science, M. Comte will 
always hold an honourable place. His treatment 
of history is eminently original and suggestive ; 
and his views, even when not wholly true, are 
rarely without a large amount of truth. His cath¬ 
olic spirit, and his hearty admiration for whatever 
is great and good in the past, are moral qualities 
beyond all praise. 

It is impossible, in our limited space, to do 
more than allude to the subjects which are so 
admirably elucidated and commented on in Mr. 
Mill’s volume. To M. Comte’s later speculations 
we do not wish to refer, further than to express 
our opinion that they are a tissue of the wildest 
and most extravagant vagaries ever conceived out¬ 
side of Bedlam; or, remembering all that the 
world owes M. Comte, we might less harshly and 
not less truly call them the most mournful exhi¬ 
bition furnished by the annals of philosophy of a 
great mind utterly shattered and ruined. It is a 
spectacle to which we cannot refuse our pitying 


141 


Comte s Positive Philosophy. 

sympathy, even while we are unable to repress 
our contempt. We have no criticism to make on 
Mr. Mill’s treatment of the subject, which is in 
the main sober and just. But we are surprised 
at the remark with which he concludes the book, 
that M. Comte should be considered as great a 
thinker as either Descartes or Leibnitz, and hardly 
more extravagant than they. M. Comte’s achieve¬ 
ments have indeed been great. But neither in 
->ne amount of mental effort implied by them, nor 
in the magnificence of their consequences, can 
they ever be compared to Descartes’s application 
of algebra to geometry, or to Leibnitz’s discovery 
of the differential calculus. Our surprise is all 
the greater since, in his recent work on Sir Wil¬ 
liam Hamilton, Mr. Mill has shown himself quite 
capable both of appreciating the transcendent 
merits of Descartes, and of sympathizing with 
the state of mind which led to the eccentricities 
of Leibnitz. M. Comte might in some respects 
be more justly compared to Bacon; and the rejec¬ 
tion of the Copernican system, which has so often 
been alleged as a proof of the narrowness of the 
latter, seems after all a trifling blemish, when we 
remember how persistently M. Comte ignores all 
that has been achieved in the department of Psy¬ 
chology. The above is one of the rare cases in 


142 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

which Mr. Mill must be accused of haste and par¬ 
tiality. And we deem it not inconsistent with the 
respect due to his noble qualities to say that, 
while his aim is ever to present in the most fa¬ 
vourable light opinions from which he differs, he 
does not always succeed in maintaining the im¬ 
partial attitude so indispensable in a critic, and 
of wnich Bayle has given us perhaps the finest 
example. 


Octooer 1865 . 


X 


ME. BUCKLE’S FALLACIES . 1 

It has always been a favourite illusion that 
social changes do not, like physical changes, 
conform to fixed and ascertainable laws. Not 
only is it that philosophers of a certain class 
have, from the earliest times, explained histori¬ 
cal events as instances of the continued interpo¬ 
sition of an arbitrary power, exterior to and in¬ 
dependent of the material universe; not only is 
it that thinkers of an opposite school have re¬ 
ferred the actions of men to a no less arbitrary 
power, operative in each individual as an ulti- 

1 As this review of Mr. Buckle’s History of Civilisation was written 
and published when I was only nineteen years old, I must not now be 
held responsible for all the opinions expressed in it. The apparently 
favourable estimate of Positivism which runs through it will best be 
understood from the preceding article, which was written only four 
years later, when my view of Comte was essentially the same. It 
will be seen that I have never been, in any legitimate sense of the 
word, a positivist. I have reproduced this article without altering a 
single word; and have appended to it a “Postscript,” written fifteen 
years later, as an illustration of the change which Mr. Buckle’s repu' 
tation has undergone. 


144 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

mate inexplicable agent; but it is that the mass 
of men have ever been accustomed to look upon 
the phenomena of society as upon isolated facts, 
incapable of any scientific explanation whatever. 
And this is what might be expected from the 
great abstruseness and complexity of the subject. 
Since the science of human actions is the most 
difficult of all, and since it depends on the sim¬ 
pler physical sciences, it was not until these in 
the course of their development had been purified 
from the dreamy obscurities of metaphysics that 
the conception of a universal and undeviating 
regularity in the succession of historic events 
was rendered possible. Accordingly, when phys¬ 
ical science was yet in its infancy, as in ancient 
times, there could be no social science. The 
speculations of Plato upon this subject were but 
profitless reveries ; and even the admirable “ Pol¬ 
itics ” of Aristotle disclosed “ no sense of the pro¬ 
gressive tendencies of humanity, nor the slight¬ 
est glimpse of the natural laws of civilization.” 1 
Coming down even to modern times, we find in 
the seventeenth century nothing better on the 
philosophy of history than the puerile “ Dis¬ 
course” of Bossuet. The profound remarks of 
Pascal and Leibnitz, in regard to the progress of 
1 Comte, Philosophie Positive , tome iv. p. 240. 


Mr, Buckle's Fallacies . 


145 


society, are to be deemed rather presentiments of 
the truth than the results of deliberate investiga¬ 
tion. Machiavelli was one of the first to subject 
social phenomena to a careful study; but he ar¬ 
rived at no broad generalizations, and “ he suf¬ 
fered, moreover, from the serious deficiency of 
being too much occupied with the practical utility 
of his subject.” 1 The u Scienza Nuova ” of Vico 
contained many new and startling views of his¬ 
tory, and the writings of Montesquieu presented 
a daring attempt to constitute a social science; 
but both these great thinkers were crippled by a 
lack of materials, owing to the imperfect condi¬ 
tion of physical knowledge at the time when they 
wrote. Condorcet, proceeding from the sugges¬ 
tions of his friend Turgot, arrived at the law 
that the whole human race is in a course of evo¬ 
lution, from the less perfect to the more perfect; 
but his writings are encumbered with metaphysi¬ 
cal notions, and he had no idea of the true nature 
of human development. For above all his pre¬ 
decessors stands Voltaire, whose “ Essai sur les 
Moeurs ” was an immortal attempt to apply the 
principles of scientific investigation to the entire 
history of our race. Nothing more was done in 
this direction until the unprecedented develop 

1 Buckle, vol. i. p. 751, note 131. 

10 


146 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

ment of physical knowledge which ushered in the 
present century was followed by the appearance 
of the “ Philosophic Positive” of Auguste Comte. 
In this noble work, social as well as physical 
changes are shown to conform to invariable laws. 
Comte thus founded social science, and opened a 
path for future discoverers. But he did not per¬ 
ceive, any more than previous inquirers, the fun¬ 
damental law of human evolution. It was re¬ 
served for Herbert Spencer to discover this all- 
comprehensive law, which is found to explain 
alike all the phenomena of man’s history and 
all those of external nature. This sublime dis¬ 
covery, — that the Universe is in a continuous 
process of evolution from the homogeneous to the 
heterogeneous, — with which only Newton’s dis¬ 
covery of the law of gravitation is at all worthy 
to be compared, underlies not only physics, but 
also history. It reveals the law to which social 
changes conform. 

This preliminary glance is necessary, in order 
to comprehend the relation of Mr. Buckle’s work 
to the treatises on social science which have pre¬ 
ceded it. Mr. Buckle is one of that series of 
philosophers who, from Plato downwards, have 
studied human affairs. The Introduction to his 
“ History of Civilization in England ” is similar 


Mr, Buckle’s Fallacies, 


147 


to the works we have just mentioned, in attempt¬ 
ing to discover the laws which regulate the prog¬ 
ress of society ; and in many respects it surpasses 
them all. Mu. Buckle, it is true, gives us no 
new method of research, like Comte; nor does 
he, as we shall see, discover any universal law, 
like Spencer. Yet, in the boldness and com¬ 
prehensiveness of his views, and in the fearless 
candour with which they are stated; in the 
wealth of his erudition, and in the honesty with 
which he applies his facts; in the noble love of 
liberty which pervades his work, and in the elo¬ 
quence which invests all parts of it with an un¬ 
dying charm, he has had few equals in any age. 
Feeling that it is but just to pronounce our 
opinion at the outset, we say this with the more 
readiness, both because in the course of this crit¬ 
icism we shall be compelled to differ from him on 
many points of vital importance, and especially 
because Mr. Buckle’s work has been received 
with a bitter and contemptuous hostility on the 
part of many reviewers, which cannot have failed 
to excite much groundless prejudice against the 
author and his doctrines. Not only is it that the 
merits of the work have been lost sight of, while 
its defects have been exaggerated to an enormous 


148 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

extent; 1 not only is it that its tendencies have 
been perversely misrepresented, and that it has 
been accused of aiming to subvert the principles 
of morality and religion : but it is that some of 
the most obvious facts upon which its arguments 
are based have been disputed; it is that the au¬ 
thor has been charged with inaccuracies and 
errors which would disgrace the composition of a 
school-boy. Without repeating or taking further 
notice of such accusations, which savour no less 
of ignorance than of a spirit of unfair deprecia¬ 
tion, we propose to examine Mr. Buckle’s leading 
propositions, in the hope of ascertaining how far 
they explain the phenomena of society. 

Proceeding on the method of investigation 
pointed out by Comte, Mr. Buckle claims to have 
established, in the volumes now before us, four 
great laws, which “ are to be deemed the basis of 
the history of civilization.” 2 

The first of these fundamental laws is “that 
the progress of mankind depends on the success 
with which the laws of phenomena are investi¬ 
gated, and on the extent to which a knowledge of 
those laws is diffused.” In laying down this prop- 

1 [I had reference to the absurd article in the Quarterly Review\ 
July, 1857.] 

2 Buckle, vol. ii. p. 1. 


Mr. Buckle s Fallacies. 


149 


osition, Mr. Buckle can, of course, make no claims 
to originality. It is simply a clear and precise 
statement of the position taken by all the fore¬ 
most thinkers of the age. For example, Mr. 
Lewes says, “ The evolutions of Humanity cor¬ 
respond with the evolutions of Thought.” 1 Mr. 
Mill says, “We are justified in concluding that 
the order of human progression in all respects 
will mainly depend on the order of progression in 
the intellectual convictions of mankind ; that is, 
on the law of the successive transformations of 
human opinions.” 2 The same is implied in Mr. 
Spencer’s law of evolution, 3 and in the law of the 
three stages of civilization announced by Comte. 4 
With respect to the proposition as it stands, we 
have no criticisms to offer. It is substantiated, 
not only by the numerous facts brought up in the 
course of Mr. Buckle’s work, but by all those 
furnished by the history of mankind in all ages 
and countries. The annals of our race are but 
an illustration of the law that “the evolutions 
of Humanity correspond with the evolutions of 
Thought.” 

1 Philosophy of the Sciences , p. 23. 

2 System of Logic , vol. ii. p. 517, 4th edition. 

3 Social Statics, pp. 409-456. Essays , pp. 1-54. First Principle 
pp. 146-218. 

4 Philosophic Positive, tome i. pp. 3-20. 


150 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

Thus far Mr. Buckle proceeds on safe ground: 
but when he attempts, in his second fundamental 
law, to go still further, and to determine how 
much of our civilization is due to intellectual, 
and how much to moral, progress, — when he at¬ 
tempts 1 to prove that the intellectual element in 
our nature is advancing, while the moral element 
is not, and that knowledge is the cause of progress, 
while good intentions are not, — he gets at once 
into complicated difficulties; and his argument, 
when stripped of its dazzling rhetoric, is so vague, 
confused, and unsatisfactory that we cannot help 
suspecting that the author has but an imperfect 
comprehension of what he is arguing for. At the 
outset, he makes an assertion directly contradic¬ 
tory to the proposition which he is to prove. He 
says, 44 There can be no doubt that a people are 
not really advancing, if, on the one hand , their 
increasing ability is accompanied by increasing 
vice , or if, on the other hand, while they are be¬ 
coming more virtuous they likewise become more 
ignorant. This double movement , moral and in¬ 
tellectual, is essential to the very idea of civiliza¬ 
tion, and includes the entire theory of mental 
progress.” 2 Having thus unequivocally expressed 
what we shall presently perceive to be in all prob- 
1 Vol. i. chap. iv. 2 Vol. i. p. 159. 


Mr. Buckle s Fallacies. 


151 


ability the true state of the case, he proceeds to 
contradict himself, by setting to work to show 
that a people advance in civilization according as 
they advance in knowledge, leaving the moral ele¬ 
ment entirely out of the question. As this is one 
of the most important points in his whole work, 
and one which has excited hot discussion, we 
shall proceed to examine it at some length, taking 
up in succession the several steps of the argument. 

Amid much that is obscurely stated, and much 
that is irrelevant to the subject, we trace the fol¬ 
lowing line of propositions : — 

I. The native faculties of men do not improve, 
so that we must look for progress only in their 
acquisitions. 

II. They acquire but few “ moral truths,” which 
“remain stationary;” but they acquire many 
“ intellectual truths,” which are “ continually ad¬ 
vancing.” 

III. Because civilization cannot be regulated 
by the “ stationary agent,” it must be regulated 
solely by intellectual progress. 

Let us see whether these statements will bear a 
critical examination. 1 

1 [This argument of “Intellects. Morals” was regarded by Mr. 
Buckle as the fundamental position of his book. See Stuart-Glennie’s 
Pilgrim Memories , p. 196.] 


152 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

I. Mr. Buckle begins by denying that the nat¬ 
ural faculties of man are in a course of develop¬ 
ment. “ Here, then, lies the gist of the whole 
matter. The progress is one, not of internal 
power, but of external advantage. The child born 
in a civilized land is not likely, as such, to be su¬ 
perior to one born among barbarians, and the dif¬ 
ference which ensues between the acts of the two 
children will be caused, so far as we know, solely 
by the pressure of external circumstances; by 
which I mean the surrounding opinions, knowl¬ 
edge, associations,—in a word, the entire mental 
atmosphere in which the two children are re¬ 
spectively nurtured.” 1 

This is only bringing up again the old dispute 
about “ the innate ” and “ the acquired,” which 
has raged for centuries among metaphysical 
thinkers, but which we thought had been satis¬ 
factorily settled by the physiologists some time 
before Mr. Buckle penned the above passage. 
After it had been proved that every organism is 
constantly advancing in the vigour and complexity 
of its functions in relation to the conditions which 
surround it, nothing more was needed. But Mr. 
Buckle appears to have forgotten this. He not 
only ignores some of the late results of physiolog- 
i Vol. i. p. 162. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


153 


ical investigation, but, still worse, in the passage 
just quoted, he flatly contradicts a theory which 
he elsewhere upholds. We refer to the doctrine, 
held by many naturalists, which supposes all the 
varieties of organic life, present and past, to have 
arisen from one or two primitive forms, by suc¬ 
cessive modifications of structure and function. 
With the evidence which might be brought for¬ 
ward in favour of this theory, we have, at pres¬ 
ent, no concern. It is enough to know that Mr. 
Buckle is himself one of its supporters, as appears 
from several passages in his work. 1 

Now, this theory supposes that all organic be¬ 
ings are continually advancing, not only in com¬ 
plexity of structure and variety of function, but 
also in the activity and vigour of their faculties. 
This may be illustrated by comparing the ex¬ 
tremes of the animal kingdom. The hydra, or 
fresh-water polyp, is little more than a mere bag. 
In common with all the acrita, he possesses nerv¬ 
ous substance, diffused in a cellular state through¬ 
out his body. 2 Moreover, if you turn him inside 

1 Vol. i. p. 806, note 130, and p. 822. The same is implied on p. 
641. He also accepts the kindred doctrine of the unity of the organic 
and inorganic worlds. (See vol. ii. pp. 529-533.) 

2 Or, more accurately speaking, he possesses a sensitive substance 
which, in more elevated beings, is specialized into nervous tissue. 
(See Lewes’ Seaside Studies, p 390.) 


154 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

out, his skin will digest, and his interior membrane 
will respire; he will apparently suffer no discom¬ 
posure from this reversed state of affairs. 1 Again, 
if you put him into a vessel of water, he will in¬ 
variably seek that part of it least exposed to the 
light, thus manifesting a rudimentary sensibility, 
which in its more developed state, in higher or¬ 
ganisms, we call vision. 2 The lower polyps ex¬ 
hibit also contractility over their whole body; 
and it has been supposed that they also possess, in 
a diffused condition, the germs of smell, taste, and 
oven hearing. 3 When now we ascend to the verte- 
brata, we find digestion specialized in the stomach, 
respiration in the lungs, contractility in the mus¬ 
cles, sensibility in the nerves ; taste, smell, hear¬ 
ing, and vision, in the mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. 
This difference coexists with a great increase of 
power in the several functions. The faculties of 
the mammal are, as every one knows, far supe¬ 
rior to those of the polyp. No one would think 
of comparing the rudimentary scent of the zo¬ 
ophyte with the developed scent of the dog, or the 
rudimentary sight of the acaleph with the devel¬ 
oped sight of the Bosjesman. Vast, indeed, is the 

1 Draper’s Human Physiology , p. 501. 

2 Spencer’s Psychology, p. 401. 

8 Ibid. pp. 394-408. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


155 


difference between the hydra, whose body is but 
one organ, feebly performing several functions, 
and the elephant, whose body is a community of 
organs, each powerfully performing its own pecul¬ 
iar function: so vast, that many persons, even 
after allowing for the accumulated influence of 
causes which have been in operation for countless 
ages, are unable to believe that the higher or¬ 
ganism could have come from the lower, through 
myriads of intermediate forms. Yet, if we are to 
believe this, — if we are to accept it as true, that 
this continuous perfecting of all the physical and 
mental faculties has been going on among the 
lower tribes ever since life first appeared on the 
earth, — why are we to suppose that it has not 
taken place in man ? Is it that, when man came 
upon the stage, one of the most comprehensive 
laws of nature was, by some miracle, suspended 
forever in his case ? Is it that in the most per¬ 
fect of organized beings, exhibiting both in struc¬ 
ture and function the completest instance of the 
evolutional process, that process could no longer 
be carried on ? If we are to accept the develop¬ 
ment theory at all, we must accept it without 
limitations. We might as well say that the hu¬ 
man race forms an exception to the operation of 
the laws of gravitation or chemical affinity as to 


156 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

say that it forms an exception in the case of the 
law of evolution, provided that law be once estab¬ 
lished. 

We shall find our conclusion inductively con¬ 
firmed, on observing that the development theory 
explains the differences between the races of man¬ 
kind, as well as those between the animal tribes. 
Premising the fact, well known to every anato¬ 
mist, that change in structure is invariably accom¬ 
panied by change in function, we notice that the 
lower races, such as the Alfurus, resemble the 
quadrumana in having very small legs, protruding 
jaws, receding foreheads, thick lips, eyes wide 
apart and curved upwards ; that as we proceed in 
turn to the red Indians, the Turanians, and the 
Semites, this resemblance becomes much less 
marked, and at last scarcely perceptible ; and 
that, on reaching the Europeans, it can no longer 
be traced, except in infants. The legs have be¬ 
come much longer and more massive than the 
arms, which have diminished in length; the jaws 
have retired; the forehead has advanced; the lips 
have become comparatively thin: the eyes have 
approached each other, and lost their upward cur¬ 
vature. These facts, so familiar to every one 
that it is almost needless to cite them, show that, 
in respect to structure, we find a marked progress 


Mr. Buckle s Fallacies. 


157 


in the human species, no less than in the animal 
tribes. Even though the European is born with 
the structural peculiarities of the savage, he loses 
them almost immediately after birth; and his 
possessing them at birth no more proves that his 
matured faculties are on the same level with those 
of the savage than his possessing the character¬ 
istics of a fish some months before birth proves 
that his matured faculties are on the same level 
with those of a fish. Unless, therefore, Mr. 
Buckle is prepared to deny that development in 
structure is necessarily attended by development 
in function, he cannot logically avoid the conclu¬ 
sion that the human species is in a course of evo¬ 
lution from the less perfect to the more perfect, — 
or, to use his own expressions, that the progress 
of mankind is one of “ internal power,’ 5 as well as 
of “external advantage.” 

We have seen that Mr. Buckle accepts the law 
of development; that it is illogical to assert that 
man forms an exception to such a universal law; 
that this law, moreover, explains the facts of hu¬ 
man variation, as well as those of animal varia¬ 
tion ; and that, consequently, Mr. Buckle’s asser¬ 
tion that human faculties do not develop is totally 
inconsistent with the very theory held by himself 
respecting organic development in general. We 


158 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

have now to show that his assertion is in itself un¬ 
founded. But, preliminary to this, we must call 
attention to another point. 

How it is that Mr. Buckle, who holds fast to 
the law of development, can reject the law of he¬ 
reditary transmission, we are unable to imagine. 
Nevertheless, reject it he does, in the following 
passage, which, as Mr. Lewes remarks, must ex¬ 
cite the astonishment of the physiologist: — 

We often hear of hereditary talents, hereditary vices, 
and hereditary virtues; but whoever will critically ex¬ 
amine the evidence will find that we have no proof 
of their existence. The way in which they are com¬ 
monly proved is in the highest degree illogical; the 
usual course being for writers to collect instances of 
some mental peculiarity found in a parent and in his 
child, and then to infer that the peculiarity was be¬ 
queathed. By this mode of reasoning, we might dem¬ 
onstrate any proposition; since, in all large fields of 
inquiry there are a sufficient number of empirical coin¬ 
cidences to make a plausible case in favour of whatever 
view a man chooses to advocate. But this is not the 
way in which truth is discovered ; and we ought to in¬ 
quire, not only how many instances there are of heredi¬ 
tary talents, etc., but how many instances there are of 
such qualities not being hereditary. Until something 
of this sort is attempted, we can know nothing about 
the matter inductively; while, until physiology and 


Mr. Buckle’s Fallacies . 


159 


chemistry are much more advanced, we can know noth¬ 
ing about it deductively. These considerations ought 
to prevent us from receiving statements which posi¬ 
tively affirm the existence of hereditary madness and 
hereditary suicide.; and the same remark applies to he¬ 
reditary disease, and with still greater force does it 
apply to hereditary vices and hereditary virtues; inas¬ 
much as ethical phenomena have not been registered as 
carefully as physiological ones, and therefore our con¬ 
clusions respecting them are even more precarious. 1 

All this sounds very fine; but we do not think 
that our ignorance of this subject is so hopeless 
as Mr. Buckle supposes. Although we are at 
present unable to explain all the phenomena of 
the case, and account for all the apparent excep¬ 
tions that arise, we do, nevertheless, all of us know 
that oaks always produce oaks, oysters oysters, 
sharks sharks, dogs dogs, and men men. We 
should probably deem it somewhat out of the 
usual course of things if a cow were to give birth 
to a leopard. We are not accustomed to think of 
a greyhound as having had for his sire an Arabian 
steed. We do not expect, on planting a nursery 
of acorns, to come back and find an orchard of 
apple-trees. And even the most unexcitable of 
ns would open his eyes at the sight of a barn-door 

1 Vol. i. p. 161, note 12. 


160 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

hen strutting about as the mother of a brood of 
eaglets. And yet, if there is no such thing as the 
transmission of qualities from parent to offspring, 
we see no reason 1 why these hypothetical cases 
should not exist as realities. “ Unless parents 
transmitted to offspring their organizations, their 
peculiarities and excellences, there would be no 
such thing as a breed or a race. The cur would 
run the same chance as the best bred dog, of 
turning out valuable. The greyhound might 
point, and the cart-horse win the Derby. Daily 
experience tell us that this is impossible. Science 
tells us that there is no such thing as chance. 
Physiology tells us that the offspring always, and 
necessarily, inherits its organization from its par¬ 
ents ; and if the organization is inherited, then with 
it must be inherited its tendencies and aptitudes.” 2 
This, from one profoundly versed in physiology, 
expresses what any one, not labouring to establish 
some preconceived theory, will at once recognize 

1 Lest it should be thought that we do injustice to Mr. Buckle, in 
giving such a broad significance to his rejection of the law of heredi¬ 
tary transmission, we give a definition of that law, taken from one of 
the greatest thinkers of our time: “ Understood in its entirety, the 
law is that each plant or animal produces others of like kind with 
itself; the likeness of kind consisting not so much in the repetition of 
individual traits as in the assumption of the same generic structure.” 
— Spencer’s Essays, p. 263. 

2 Lewes’ Physiology of Common Life, vol. ii. p. 377. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


161 


as the real state of the case. And, indeed, since 
structure and function are inseparably connected; 
since diversity of structure necessarily supposes 
diversity of function, and similarity of structure 
similarity of function, it follows that, as like pro¬ 
duces like in the case of structural forms, so also 
must like produce like in the case of functional 
peculiarities; and as the nervous system is but a 
part of the organism, and must come under the 
same generalization as the whole, so also does the 
same hold true of the functions of the nervous 
system, that is, of thought, feeling, and the like. 
In other words, there must be cases not only of 
hereditary madness and hereditary disease, but 
also of hereditary vices and hereditary virtues, so 
long as disease and madness, virtue and vice, co¬ 
exist with peculiar structural states. And, as be¬ 
fore, unless Mr. Buckle is prepared to deny the 
inseparable connection of structure and function, 
he cannot escape this conclusion. 

As we have already observed, it is passing 
strange that Mr. Buckle, while embracing the 
law of development, should spurn that of heredi¬ 
tary transmission, to which it is so intimately re¬ 
lated, and on which it, in some degree, depends 
for its proofs. But Mr. Buckle has a theory of 
his own to maintain. He wishes to show that 
11 


162 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

the faculties of men do not improve. It is in or¬ 
der to do this that he rejects the law of transmis¬ 
sion. But it has been shown that his rejection of 
it is illogical, and that the law of transmission is 
as universal as any other, since, were it not so, 
there could be no such thing as a species at all. 
With the help of this law, it is easy to demon¬ 
strate that, in the very nature of things, the fac¬ 
ulties of men must improve. 

Among that “highest class of biological truths,” 
which apply to all organisms whatever, is the law 
that, “ other things equal, development varies as 
function ; ” 1 that is, the growth of any organ de¬ 
pends upon its activity. We are everywhere met 
by instances of this: not only in the gymnast, 
who surprises us by the great size and power of 
his muscles ; not only in the sailor, who sees a 
ship in the distant offing, when the passenger can 
descry but a speck; not only in the musician, 
who recognizes as different two sounds which to 
unpractised ears are alike; but also in the man 
of science, who unravels with ease problems which 
to common apprehensions are insoluble. “ On 
this law are based all maxims and methods of 
right education, intellectual, moral, and physical.” 2 
Expressed in the form, “ Practice makes perfect,” 
1 Spencer’s Essays, d. 262. 2 Ibid. p. 263. 


Mr . Buckle's Fallacies. 


163 


it is an axiom in every one’s mouth. By exer¬ 
cising an organ, we increase its size and power. 
By neglecting to exercise it, we cause it to be¬ 
come diminutive, weak, inefficient. 

It is evident, then, that when an individual has 
grown to maturity in the constant exercise of any 
faculty, the organ answering to that faculty will 
be correspondingly developed; and that, in the 
natural course of things, he will transmit to his 
offspring that , faculty in its state of increased 
power. Thus it is that a Philip becomes the 
father of an Alexander; that the son of a Ber¬ 
nardo Tasso gives to the world a deathless poem; 
and that a family of three hundred musical gen¬ 
iuses at last counts among its members Johann 
Sebastian Bach. In individual cases, however, 
the operation of this law is obscured and often 
hindered by a concurrence of unfavourable cir¬ 
cumstances. It is in the case of large collections 
of individuals, where the disturbing causes are 
averaged, that we find it most strikingly exempli¬ 
fied. Thus we see red Indians so swift of foot; 
u the telescopic-eyed Bushmen ; ” and Peruvians 
with sense of smell so acute that, according to 
Humboldt, they can distinguish by it, in the mid¬ 
dle of the night, to what race a man belongs. 1 Ex- 

1 Dunglison’s Human Physiology , vol. i. p. 729. 


164 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

tending our view from separate nations to the 
whole race, we perceive the law in still greater 
generality. While some nations have been devel¬ 
oping in some faculties, others have been develop¬ 
ing in others, and the total movement has been 
ever onward. Each generation has inherited the 
faculties of the preceding, still further improved 
by constant employment. Phoenicians have thus 
spread commerce through unknown seas; Greeks 
have educated the world; Romans have legislated 
for it; Hindus, Jews, and Arabs have given it re¬ 
ligions; Germans have deluged it with systems 
of philosophy ; Frenchmen and Englishmen have 
given it positive knowledge; Americans have, 
by inventive genius, furnished material comforts; 
Italians have added the glorious embodiments of 
beauty, grace, and charm ; and the consensus of 
the whole is civilization. Retrogression nowhere 
meets us; progress meets us everywhere; and, 
from the considerations above adduced, we are 
obliged to conclude that this advance has been 
one as well of “ internal power ” as of “ external 
advantage.” Mr. Buckle’s assertion is, therefore, 
seen to be not only inconsistent, but also un¬ 
founded. 

II. Having now proved, as he thinks, that we 
must look for progress in “ external advantage " 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 165 

only, and not in 44 internal power,” onr author 
goes on to show the 44 superiority of intellectual 
acquisitions over moral feelings; ” and first he 
asserts that all our acquisitions are either 44 moral 
truths ” or “ intellectual truths,” and that the 
former are 44 stationary,” while the latter are con¬ 
tinually advancing. It is noticeable that he here 
deplores the difficulties which arise 44 from the 
loose and careless manner in which ordinary lan¬ 
guage is employed on subjects that require the 
greatest nicety and precision.” 1 After giving us 
this caution, one would naturally expect to find 
our author very clear and accurate in the choice 
of terms, and in the statement of propositions; 
but, on the contrary, the loose and careless man¬ 
ner in which he himself employs ordinary lan¬ 
guage throughout the discussion is quite amazing. 
In the first place, he makes a verbally unintelligi¬ 
ble distinction between 44 intellectual truths ” and 
“moral truths.” Scientifically speaking, there 
can be no such thing as a 44 moral truth; ” for 
every truth is a proposition, consisting of subject, 
predicate, and copula; and is uttered and recog¬ 
nized by the intellect, not by the 44 moral in¬ 
stinct,” which belongs to the emotional part of 
our nature. It is the province of intellect to 


1 Vol. i. p. 159. 


166 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

think, of emotion to feel. Mr. Buckle falls into 
exactly the same error in a singular passage in 
his second volume, where he says : — 

The emotions are as much a part of us as the under¬ 
standing: they are as truthful ; they are as likely to he 
right. Though their view is different, it is not capri¬ 
cious. They obey fixed laws; they follow an orderly 
and uniform course; they run in sequences; they have 
their logic and method of inference . 1 

All this is either strained metaphor or down¬ 
right nonsense. If it were true, what would be 
the use of making any distinction at all between 
intellect and feeling ? If to feel is to judge, and 
to experience an emotion is to lay down a prop¬ 
osition, why not include both under one name? 
Mr. Buckle is misled by the fact that, in all our 
mental operations, feeling and thinking are closely 
united. Our wishes colour our judgments. We 
are all led, in many cases, to believe that to be 
true which we wish to be true. Thus emotional 
states give rise to intellectual states. On the 
other hand, Mr. Bain has shown that belief, when 
active, always leads to volition ; 2 and as volition is 
the final stage of emotion, we perceive that intel¬ 
lectual states likewise occasion emotional states. 

1 Vol. ii. p. 502. 

2 Bain, The Emotions and the Will, pp. 568-598. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 167 

Bat this intimate connection of the two should 
not lead us to confound the one with the other; 
and we fall into a grave error whenever we do so. 
Once more we repeat, it is the province of emo¬ 
tion to feel, of the intellect to think and form 
propositions. Scientifically speaking, therefore, 
all truths are intellectual; and there can be no 
such thing as a “ moral truth.” 

But there is another sense in which the expres¬ 
sion “ moral truths ” may be taken. It may mean 
“ truths relative to morality.” Mr. Buckle gener¬ 
ally uses it in this sense, but he so often com 
founds “ moral truths ” with “ moral feelings ” 
that the foregoing remarks were rendered neces¬ 
sary to a right understanding of his argument. 

Our author then declares that the truths which 
we possess relating to morality have not changed 
for thousands of years. No, they have not. 
Neither have “ intellectual truths.” A truth, 
once established, never changes, cannot change; 
otherwise it would be no truth, but a falsehood. 
Take, for example, the law of gravitation : “ All 
bodies in the universe attract each other with 
forces directly proportional to dieir masses, and 
inversely proportional to the squares of their dis¬ 
tances apart.” We have had no occasion to alter 
this statement since the time of Newton. It is a 


168 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

demonstrated truth, and will never be susceptible 
of the slightest change. The same is the case 
with the truth, “ It is wrong to kill.” Once rec¬ 
ognized, this truth can experience no change, for 
the very reason that it is a truth, and not a false¬ 
hood. In a word, when a proposition has been 
once shown to be true it will forever remain so, 
whether it relates to our moral obligations, or to 
anything else whatever. There is no ground for 
Mr. Buckle’s distinction. 

Nor would our author be one whit the more 
justified in saying, as he might say, that the inter¬ 
pretation put upon “ moral truths ” is unchanging 
as compared with that put upon “ intellectual 
truths.” On the contrary, it appears to us that 
the reverse is the case. When a truth relating 
to some of the simpler subjects of investigation is 
once received, its interpretation usually admits of 
little change. To employ the same example as 
before, the law of gravitation is received in the 
same acceptation now as when it was first discov¬ 
ered. Advancing to the more abstruse sciences, 
such as physiology, we find that the interpreta¬ 
tion put upon generally received truths suffers 
marked variations. The law of organic develop¬ 
ment has been held by the most eminent scientific 
thinkers since the beginning of the present cen« 


Mr. Buckle s Fallacies. 169 

tury; but, since the embryological discoveries of 
the Germans, it is held in a form different from 
that in which it was held before. The followers 
of Spencer, Lewes, and Darwin do not put the 
same interpretation upon the law of development 
that the followers of Lamarck did, forty years 
ago. Coming now to the very complex subject of 
morality, we find, unfortunately for Mr. Buckle, 
that the acceptation in which its propositions are 
held varies with every phase of civilization. 
Among the American Indians, so noted for their 
revengeful dispositions, the obligation not to take 
life, if recognized, was not so construed as to in¬ 
clude the miserable object of the fell passion. 
Among the ancient Jews, the command “ Thou 
shalt not kill ” meant “ Thou shalt not kill Jews ; ” 
and, from the story of Saul and Agag, we may 
suppose that the murder of Gentiles was consid¬ 
ered rather a meritorious act than otherwise. 
And in general, where the same “ moral truths ” 
have been received, it has been in as many differ¬ 
ent ways as there were different kinds of people 
to receive them. This fact, that the way in which 
generally received truths are understood varies as 
the complexity of the sciences to which they be¬ 
long, results from the obvious circumstance that 
the more complex a science is, the less we know 


170 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

about it. As we know less about moral science 
than about any other, our opinions, even about 
those “moral truths” which are universally ad¬ 
mitted, are more liable to change than our opin¬ 
ions about similarly received truths in other mat¬ 
ters. Mr. Buckle could have, therefore, no ground 
for asserting that the interpretation put upon 
“ moral truths ” is unchanging as compared with 
that put upon “ intellectual truths.” 

Our author says, somewhat inconsistently, that 
“ moral truths ” receive no additions, and again 
that they receive fewer additions than “ intellec¬ 
tual truths.” We shall speedily show that the 
first of these statements is at variance with fact, 
and that the second has no logical value, and will 
not help his argument in the least. 

It is not true that “ moral truths ” have re¬ 
ceived no additions. It is not true, as Mr. Buckle 
says, that “ the sole essentials of morals have 
been known for thousands of years, and not one 
jot or tittle has been added to them by all the 
sermons, homilies, and text-books which moralists 
have been able to produce.” It is not true, as 
Sir James Mackintosh says, that “ morality ad¬ 
mits of no discoveries.” It is not true, as Con- 
dorcet says, that “ la morale de toutes les nations 
a ete la mSme” It is not true, as Kant says, that 


Mr . Buckle’s Fallacies. 171 

“ in der Moralphilosophie sind wir nicht weiter 
gekommen als die Alten .” For what is Moral 
Philosophy but the science which is to determine 
the laws to which our conduct should conform? 
And if this is the case, we need only to look into 
Mr. Buckle’s work itself, to find a system of 
morality containing truths which only two cen¬ 
turies ago were not even dreamed of. Take, for 
example, the moral law that governments shall 
not interfere with trade. This is as much a moral 
law as that which forbids stealing: but we find 
Mr. Buckle reckoning it among the merits of 
Voltaire, that he was one of the first to perceive 
the justice of a free system of trade. 1 Its justice 
is even now denied by opponents of reform. 
This, then, is a case of a “ moral truth ” which 
has not been known for thousands of years. 

Mr. Buckle may say, however, that he does not 
use the term “ morality ” in so wide a sense, — 
that he means by it merely a collection of general 
rules and precepts, serving as rough guides for 
daily conduct. Of course, if Mr. Buckle chooses 
to define his terms to suit himself, he can prove 
anything. If he defines morality so as to make 
it include nothing but the precepts known three 
thousand years ago, and then says that all moral 
i Vol. i. p. 741. 


172 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

truths now known were known then, he merely 
asserts that what was known then was known 
then; a statement which probably few will be 
hardy enough to dispute, but which unfortunately 
leaves the argument just where it was before. 

But supposing we accept this narrow definition 
of morality, what will become of our author’s 
statement, even then ? He himself quotes, from 
several authors, passages which show that there 
was a time when some nations did not acknowl¬ 
edge the moral law forbidding murder. “ Among 
some Macedonian tribes, the man who had never 
slain an enemy was marked by a degrading 
badge.” 1 And at the present day, among bar¬ 
barous tribes, as the Dyaks of Borneo, “ a man 
cannot marry until he has procured a human 
head ; and he that has several may be distin¬ 
guished by his proud and lofty bearing, for it 
constitutes his patent of nobility.” 2 By calling 
up these facts, Mr. Buckle destroys his own 
statement that “ moral truths ” receive no addi¬ 
tions. 

As for his other assertion, — that “ moral 
truths” receive fewer additions than “ intellectual 

1 Grote’s History of Greece , vol. xi. p. 397, quoted in Buckle, vol 
i p. 176, note 29. 

2 Journal of Asiatic Society , vol. iv. p. 181. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


173 


truths,” — it means simply that fewer discoveries 
are made in moral science than in all the other 
sciences put together. It is as if he should say 
that “ optical truths ” receive fewer additions than 
“ physical truths.” As we have shown, he is 
not justified in using the expression “ intellectual 
truths,” so as to exclude from it truths relating 
to morality, which are recognized by the intellect 
as much as any others. His statement, there¬ 
fore, merely compares a part with all the other 
parts of the whole to which it belongs. 

We are quite willing to admit that moral science 
has not been enriched by as many discoveries as 
any one of the other sciences. This results from 
the circumstance that it is far more difficult and 
complicated than the rest. Our knowledge of 
morality is less complete than our knowledge of 
chemistry, for the same reason that our acquaint¬ 
ance with chemistry is less perfect than our ac¬ 
quaintance with astronomy. The laws express¬ 
ing the relations of men to one another are the 
most recondite of all, and the most liable to ap¬ 
parent exceptions. We are accordingly longer in 
ascertaining them. 

To sum up : we have seen that the distinction 
made by Mr. Buckle between “ intellectual ” and 
“ moral ” truths is a vague and popular one, and 


174 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

will not bear a critical analysis. We have 
throughout, however, used the expression “ moral 
truths” as equivalent to “truths relating to 
moral subjects,” and the expression “ intellectual 
truths ” as equivalent to “ truths relating to all 
other subjects : ” and this is admissible, because 
it gives the meaning intended by the author. 
We have then shown: first, that intellectual 
truths are as fixed and unchangeable as moral 
truths; secondly, that the interpretation put upon 
moral truths is even less constant than that put 
upon intellectual truths; thirdly, that moral 
truths receive additions, no less than intellectual 
truths; fourthly, that the fact that moral truths 
receive fewer additions than intellectual truths is 
of no logical value, because it compares one class 
of truths with several; and fifthly, that the cir¬ 
cumstance that moral science advances with a 
slower pace than the other sciences shows only 
that it is more complex than they are, but does 
not warrant us in assuming that it is radically 
different from them. Reviewing our conclusions 
in this compact form, we see that moral truths 
come under the same category as intellectual 
truths, throughout. This confirms what we said 
at the outset, that there is no such difference be¬ 
tween them as Mr. Buckle supposes, and that 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


175 


both should be spoken of together as truths or 
judgments in distinction from feelings. Mr. 
Buckle’s argument, then, when laid bare, is as 
follows: that some truths are constant, while 
others are not, — which is false ; and that one set 
of truths receives additions, while another does 
not, — which is also false. 

But this is not all. Our author’s argument is 
not only untenable, but it is irrelevant to the sub¬ 
ject in debate. Even if he could establish his 
point, he would be none the more forward. 
Startling as this assertion may seem, it is never¬ 
theless indisputable. For if his reasoning hith¬ 
erto were valid, it would prove merely this — 
that our knowledge of some subjects advances, 
while our knowledge of others does not. But Mr. 
Buckle’s professed object is to show that feeling 
as compared with knowledge is of no account as a 
civilizing force. To what end, then, does he go 
so far out of his way in giving us this jumble of 
ill-digested argument to show the “ superiority ” 
of some intellectual acquisitions over others ? This 
singular aberration results from his confounding 
truth with feeling, the intellectual with the emo¬ 
tional part of our nature. He seems to forget the 
distinction between knowing in what duty con¬ 
sists and having the intention to perform it. But 


176 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

it is altogether one thing to wish to do right, and 
another thing to know what it is right to do, as 
many a luckless wight finds out to his cost. Far¬ 
ther on Mr. Buckle recognizes the distinction 
clearly enough. 

It would, however, be rather unfortunate than 
otherwise for Mr. Buckle’s main argument if he 
could succeed in showing that “ the sole essentials 
of morality have been known for thousands of 
years.” For if it were true that men knew what 
was right — that they were acquainted with all 
the laws to which our conduct ought to conform 
— in ancient times as well as at the present day, 
and that they have nevertheless advanced in the 
practice of morality, we should be obliged to con¬ 
clude that, as the knowledge has remained station¬ 
ary, it must have been the development of moral 
feeling and the increase of good intentions alone 
which could have occasioned the progress. The 
contrast is really between moral truths and moral 
feelings. So that, if Mr. Buckle had succeeded in 
proving that “ moral knowledge ” does not ad¬ 
vance, and should at the same time succeed in his 
attempt to prove that “ moral feeling ” does not 
improve, he would, if consistent, arrive at the 
singular result that there has been no improve¬ 
ment at all in the actions of men. 


Mr. Buckle s Fallacies. 


177 


It is quite a relief, on emerging from this laby¬ 
rinth of baseless assertion and ill-directed argu¬ 
ment, to find that our author at last seems to re¬ 
member his original object, as he sets himself to 
work really to show the “ superiority ” of knowl¬ 
edge over feeling as a civilizing agent. His rea¬ 
soning is here very plausible, and his illustrations 
drawn from the history of war and religious per¬ 
secution are well chosen, and appear at first quite 
convincing. He tells us that good intentions were 
of no avail in stopping persecution, because perse¬ 
cutors themselves have generally had the best in¬ 
tentions. The heathen emperors of Rome, who tor¬ 
tured Catholics, the Catholic Inquisitors of Spain, 
who tortured Protestants, all meant well enough, 
he argues, — they were very often men of the pur¬ 
est character; but they did not know that it was 
wrong for them to interfere with the religious con¬ 
victions of others. So Mr. Buckle does perceive, 
after all, that our knowledge of our moral obliga¬ 
tions has increased somewhat! We are no bet¬ 
ter, he says, than the Inquisitors of old, but we 
know that religious persecution is wrong, wicked, 
harmful; while they, in their mistaken zeal, 
thought it to be right, holy, beneficial. This 
point he argues admirably, but he does not suc¬ 
ceed in absolving religious persecutors from all 


178 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

charge of selfish passion. Indeed, he elsewhere 
expresses it as his own opinion that the clergy 
have been strongly influenced, in their vindictive 
attempts to destroy or injure those dissenting 
from their views, by motives of ambitious policy. 
We have no doubt that such motives have always 
been of immense power among this class of men, 
as well as among other classes. But we will not 
urge this or any similar objection against Mr. 
Buckle's grand argument. We will merely call 
attention to the circumstance that a man’s “ moral 
feeling,” his “ moral instinct,” his “ conscience,” 
or whatever any one chooses to call it, is a natural 
faculty. In other words, ethical emotions, being 
functions of the nervous system, are natural facul¬ 
ties. And we have already shown that the nat¬ 
ural faculties of mankind develop. The refuta¬ 
tion of Mr. Buckle’s first grand argument carries 
with it the refutation of the second. 

III. It carries with it, likewise, the refutation 
of the third. For the proposition that civilization 
is regulated, not by the “ stationary agent,” but 
by intellectual acquirement, can have no value, 
unless it be proved that moral feeling is the “ sta¬ 
tionary agent.” But this cannot be proved. On 
the contrary, it has been shown that our powers, 
both moral and intellectual, are continually devel* 


Mr . Buckle's Fallacies . 179 

oping, and that our acquisitions, both moral and 
intellectual, are constantly increasing. The moral 
element is, then, no more stationary than the in¬ 
tellectual ; and thus Mr. Buckle’s third grand ar¬ 
gument falls to the ground, and with it falls his 
fundamental law, which is shown to be utterly 
destitute of any truth whatever. 

It may be well to remark, before proceeding 
further, that rejection of Mr. Buckle’s second 
law is perfectly compatible with acceptance of 
his first. There is no inconsistency in saying, on 
the one hand, that moral feeling is a civilizing 
agency, and, on the other hand, that the progress 
of civilization conforms to the successive trans¬ 
formations of opinion. For the ethical as well 
as all the other emotions enter largely into every 
opinion-forming process. Though our emotions 
do not combine into propositions the ideas which 
are constituent parts of our beliefs, they do none 
the less, as Mr. Bain has clearly proved, 1 sway 
the intellect as it performs this operation. The 
emotions accordingly enter into every act of be¬ 
lief, and there can be no complete theory of human 
opinion which leaves them out of account. Thus 
our acceptance of Mr. Buckle’s first law confirms 

1 See the whole of his admirable work on The Emotions and the 
Will, 


180 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

our rejection of his second, and we see, more 
clearly than ever, that “the double movement, 
moral and intellectual, is essential to the very 
idea of civilization,” and that, without including 
both elements, there can be no complete theory of 
progress. 

It may likewise be well to remark that a dis¬ 
cussion of this sort has no immediate bearing on 
the subject of Christianity. It has been supposed 
by some persons that Mr. Buckle’s entire argu¬ 
ment is nothing but a sinister attack upon the 
Christian religion. We see nothing of the kind 
in it. Christianity is a system of belief, in which 
both intellectual and moral forces must co-oper¬ 
ate; and a person, while denying the civilizing 
agency of the moral element, may with perfect 
consistency maintain the civilizing agency of that 
set of opinions in the formation of which the 
moral element has had but a partial share. Our 
author’s argument, therefore, is not to be con¬ 
strued into an assault upon Christianity, nor is 
our own argument to be construed into a defence 
of it. Confusion necessarily results from mixing 
questions which should be kept separate. 

We come now to Mr. Buckle’s third 1 law — 

1 On the first page of his second volume, Mr. Buckle places this 
fow second in order, and the law just considered third. But as it ia 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 181 

that scepticism “ has in every department of 
thought been the invariable preliminary to all the 
intellectual revolutions through which the human 
mind has passed,” and that “without it there 
could be no progress, no change, no civilization.” 1 
In examining this proposition, it is needful, at 
the outset, to have a clear idea of the nature of 
scepticism, as understood by Mr. Buckle. The 
word itself has been variously interpreted ; some¬ 
times in a more general sense, as meaning the 
absolute denial of all dogmas, theories, and be¬ 
liefs whatever; sometimes in a more special sense, 
as signifying disbelief in the peculiar doctrines of 
Christianity. It is in neither of these senses that 
Mr. Buckle uses the word. He defines scepti¬ 
cism as suspension of judgment, or hesitation in 
forming or receiving an opinion. A true sceptic, 
then, would neither believe nor disbelieve any¬ 
thing at all. He would doubt even his own 
doubts. History presents but few instances of 
a consistent and thorough-going sceptic. Pyrrho 
and Hume will, however, serve sufficiently well 
as examples. Scepticism is not to be confounded 
with that philosophy which, not content with 


convenient to examine this law in connection with the fourth, we 
have taken the liberty to alter Mr. Buckle’s arrangement, 
i Vol. i. p. 328. 


182 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

doubting, absolutely denies. This might be called 
negative philosophy, or negativism, in broad dis¬ 
tinction from positive philosophy, which aims at 
establishing from incontrovertible data a system 
of results comprising all that it is in the power of 
the human mind to know. Negativism and pos¬ 
itivism, then, constitute two opposite phases of 
human thought. As examples of negative think¬ 
ers, we have Hobbes, Voltaire, Lessing, and 
Rousseau; while as instances of positive thinkers 
we may cite Bacon, Leibnitz, Newton, and Spen¬ 
cer. Scepticism is identical with neither of these 
philosophies, though it has some points in com¬ 
mon with both. Scepticism, indeed, is not a phi¬ 
losophy at all; it is a no-philosophy, — a transi¬ 
tion state where, robbed of its belief, the mind 
rests not, but stays unresting, in dreary incerti¬ 
tude and distressful vacillation, until it finds refuge 
in belief again. 

Bearing in mind this meaning of the word, 
we can safely proceed to examine the proposition 
before us. We do not think it altogether prob¬ 
able that Mr. Buckle would, on mature reflection, 
lay down this law about scepticism as a univer¬ 
sal one, operative alike in all stages of progress ; 
but, as he makes no limitations to it in the course 
of his work, we must discuss it here in relation 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 183 

to the three stages of mental evolution, and see 
whether or not it is alike applicable to all. 

We shall find, to begin with, that it is not ap¬ 
plicable to the theological state. When man first 
looked upon the wonders of Nature, his untaught 
imagination gave birth to weird, fantastic shapes 
innumerable, peopling the air, the streams, the 
forest, and the mountain-chasm. Just awakened, 
as it were, to self-consciousness, and feeling his 
own life thrilling within him, he ascribed that life 
to everything around him. He looked upon the 
wide, dark surface of the “ many-sounding sea,” 
and saw there a mighty, restless, earth-upheaving 
Power, which refinement afterwards personified, 
and called Poseidon. Gazing above him on the 
blue expanse which seemed to encompass the 
“ plain of the earth,” he came to recognize there 
a Divinity of light and warmth, a Devas, a pater¬ 
nal Zeus. When the bright clouds flitted along 
the sky, it was Hermes driving the celestial cat¬ 
tle to the milking; when the north-wind arose, 
cold and blustering, it was Boreas storming in his 
wrath; when the stars came out at night, there 
were countless deities to whom this primitive man 
made sacred the days of the week. The changes 
of the seasons, the ceaselessly recurring death 
and resurrection of Nature, were typified in wild 


184 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

legends of Jemshid and Zohak, of Osiris and 
Thammuz, of Hylas and Orpheus. The whole 
universe was thinking, feeling, and willing. Noth¬ 
ing was dead or inert; all things were endowed 
with life and activity. From this came sacrifices, 
shrines and temples, oracles, and sacerdotal or¬ 
ders. It would be difficult to find any traces of 
scepticism in all this. Belief then reigned alone 
in the human mind, and doubt found no place 
there. As long as the phenomenal was as yet 
harder to comprehend and more difficult to con¬ 
trol than the unseen and unexplored world that 
lay beyond it, scepticism was impossible. Not 
only was it impossible, but it would have been 
harmful. For the primitive man was barbarous, 
treacherous, revengeful. 1 His selfish instincts 
were as yet all in all. His sympathetic and so¬ 
cial feelings were as yet undeveloped. In such 
a rude condition it was only the bond of a firmly 
rooted and wide-spread belief — it was only the 
ascendency of a priestly and governmental or¬ 
der, thus secured — which could keep society 
from being disorganized. Had scepticism been 
once let in, religious and political organization 
would have been weakened, sects and parties 
would have sprung up prematurely, and the 
i Spencer’s Social Statics , pp. 409-413. 


Mr. Buckle’s Fallacies. 185 

strong check needful to curb the undisciplined 
passions of men would have been destroyed, civili¬ 
zation would have stopped, and society could no 
longer have existed. It was only after centuries 
of theocratic and monarchic rule — after the pri¬ 
meval nomadic mode of life had been long aban¬ 
doned, and agriculture and commerce had in 
course of time, by mingling men with each other 
in peaceful relations, called forth social virtues — 
that scepticism could safely arise. And then it 
did arise. We find it first showing itself in the 
states of Greece, where popular despots arose and 
were overthrown, as at Korinth, Sikyon, and Me- 
gara; and where philosophers began to speculate 
about the first principles of things, as Thales, 
Xenophanes, and Herakleitos. Thenceforward 
scepticism increased, until it reached for a time 
its culmination in the universal doubts of Pyrrho. 
But it is not in ancient times at all that we are 
to look for any very prominent manifestation of 
scepticism. The spirit of doubting and hesitat¬ 
ing inquiry was of slow growth, and did not at¬ 
tain to its maturity until monotheism had been 
established in Europe for more than a thousand 
years. Not only, therefore, has scepticism not 
always been essential to progress; not only have 
some important changes in human opinion—-as 


186 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

the change from fetishism to polytheism — been 
accomplished without it; but also, in the first of 
the three great periods of civilization it did not 
arise at all until very late, and was then but a 
secondary force in the minds of men. 

It is in the metaphysical or revolutionary pe¬ 
riod of modern society, extending from the twelfth 
century to the present time, that we see the scep¬ 
tical spirit in full operation. To this stage of 
human evolution Mr. Buckle’s proposition is ap¬ 
plicable without any limitations. The applica¬ 
tion he has himself given us, with great fullness 
and detail, in the case of England, France, Spain, 
and Scotland. In the brief space to which we are 
here restricted, it would be vain to attempt to add 
to the profuse and happily chosen illustrations 
contained in those instructive chapters which our 
author has principally devoted to this portion of 
his subject. Nowhere else has the revolutionary 
period of history been so admirably portrayed. 
Nowhere else can we find a truer, a juster, a pro¬ 
founder appreciation of the workings of the scep¬ 
tical spirit. Here we discover no inconsistencies, 
no errors of statement, vitiating the whole ar¬ 
gument. Here Mr. Buckle reveals his wonder¬ 
ful power. Here he draws sure conclusions from 
well - ascertained data. For there can be no 


Mr . Buckle s Fallacies . 


187 


shadow of doubt that in the twelfth century the 
sceptical spirit had begun greatly to increase its 
power and extend its influence ; that in the six¬ 
teenth it had become a mighty civilizing force; 
and that in the eighteenth it had penetrated all 
departments of thought. It was this sceptical 
spirit which gave rise to the conceptualism of 
Abelard, the infidelity of Yanini, and the heresy 
of Wyclif. It became, as Mr. Buckle remarks, 
“ in physics, the precursor of science ; in politics, 
of liberty; and in theology, of toleration.” But 
for the scepticism in his own mind, Luther could 
not have become the founder of Protestantism; 
and but for the scepticism already rife in the 
minds of others, he could have found no followers. 
We find scepticism dictating the metaphysics of 
Descartes and the diplomacy of Richelieu. We 
find it inciting the English to rebellion against 
the despotism of the Stuarts, and striving, though 
vainly, in the wars of the Fronde, to establish po¬ 
litical liberty in France. It lay at the foundation 
of the sensationalism of Locke and the idealism 
of Berkeley, and was itself at last organized into 
an independent system by Hume. It was the 
opening phase of that negative philosophy which, 
first receiving definite shape in the deism of Her¬ 
bert and Bolingbroke, ended in the atheism of 


188 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Diderot and Helvetius. It was the parent of the 
transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte, the physio- 
philosophic vagaries of Schelling and Carus, the 
absolutism of Hegel, and the pantheism of Feu¬ 
erbach. Carried into science, it paved the way 
for the immortal discoveries of Lavoisier and Bi¬ 
chat. Wielded by Voltaire, it broke down eccle¬ 
siastical power in France; and in the hands of 
Rousseau swept away the vilest of despotisms by 
the most fearful of revolutions. It roused the 
Dutch to cast off the yoke of Spain, sent the Pu¬ 
ritans to Massachusetts, inspired the Americans 
in their “ Declaration of Independence,” and 
shaped the fabric of their democratic government. 
What need of further examples ? It is the scep¬ 
tical spirit, advocating liberty in politics and tol¬ 
eration in religion, which has been at the bottom 
of every change through which humanity has 
passed in modern times. Mr. Buckle’s law is en¬ 
tirely applicable to the metaphysical period of 
civilization, and is the key to the explanation of 
its phenomena. 

But the metaphysical state is not a permanent 
one. It constitutes a transition from that primi¬ 
tive belief which was the offspring of man’s early 
endeavours to compass and explain the Infinite 
about him, to that new belief which is founded 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


189 


on a long and thorough investigation into the 
laws of the natural world. Giving up as hope¬ 
less all search for the undiscoverable, all striving 
to know the unknowable, science contents itself 
with finding out that which lies within our reach. 
But it was not in the power of man, on first per¬ 
ceiving the inadequacy and incongruity of his old 
belief, to pass at once to the new. No one can 
reject an old system of opinions, which has shaped 
his thoughts and guided his actions in the past, 
and then take up a new system, to shape his 
thoughts and guide his actions in the future, with¬ 
out going through an intermediate state of pain¬ 
ful and wearisome doubt. As with the individ¬ 
ual, so with the race. The sceptical period could 
not but intervene. It was only after countless 
attempts to explore the dark and dangerous re¬ 
gion of the Infinite had all proved futile — it was 
only after successive theories had all been weighed 
in the balance, and found wanting — that man 
could come at last to repose in the calm spirit and 
sure methods of scientific inquiry. Before this 
must necessarily have come that tumultuous sea¬ 
son of doubt and denial, of discord and revolu¬ 
tion, in which the sceptical spirit reigned su¬ 
preme. The rottenness of old institutions, forms 
and dogmas, had to be exposed before they could 


190 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

be given up. Then the barrenness of doubt had 
to make itself felt before it could be supplanted 
by knowledge. It was not until Hume, by carry¬ 
ing scepticism to its uttermost extent, had shown 
its unsatisfactory character and vain results, that 
the germs of scientific method, implanted by Ba¬ 
con and Descartes, could develop and bear fruit 
in the positive philosophy of Comte. 

As the metaphysical period is but a transition 
from the theological to the positive, it only re¬ 
mains to show that scepticism is peculiar to it, 
being a transition from belief to knowledge. We 
have here very few facts to guide us to an induc¬ 
tive investigation, since the positive era is only 
now commencing. But, if we consider the state 
of human thought at the present day on the vari¬ 
ous subjects of scientific research, we shall find 
that in the most advanced departments scepticism 
no longer finds a place. Astronomers long ago 
gave over doubting and asking questions of each 
other about the fact of the earth’s motion. It 
was the scepticism of Copernicus and Galileo that 
overthrew the old notion of its fixity; but that 
scepticism speedily issued in positive certainty. 
Whether a man believes or disbelieves in the mo¬ 
tion of the earth is now a mere matter of knowl¬ 
edge or ignorance. There is no place for doubt, 


Mr. Buckle s Fallacies. 


191 


no room for difference of opinion. So with all 
demonstrated facts and laws. A truth once estab¬ 
lished remains forever a truth. We cannot choose 
but accept it. And science, as a body of estab¬ 
lished truths, cannot admit of scepticism. 

The past history of science confirms, and its 
future progress must also confirm, this conclusion, 
which might be drawn at once from the very na¬ 
ture of thought. When we know as much about 
the most complex subjects as we now know about 
the most simple ones, there can be no such thing 
as doubt at all. “ The mystic drama will be 
sunny clear, and all Nature’s processes will be 
visible to man, as a divine Effluence and Life.” 1 

We have seen that in the theological stage of 
human development scepticism did not exist; 
that in the metaphysical stage it arose and ex¬ 
tended its sway over every department of thought; 
but that in the positive stage it is destined to 
decrease, until it exercises no perceptible influ¬ 
ence. Corresponding to these three stages of evo¬ 
lution are the three predominant mental states of 
belief, doubt, and knowledge. The three great 
periods into which Comte has divided the history 
of civilization might be named with perfect accu¬ 
racy the period of credulity, the period of seep- 
1 Lewes’ Seaside Studies , p. 219. 


192 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

ticism, and the period of science. Mr. Buckle’s 
law has this much of truth in it, that the scepti¬ 
cal age is the necessary forerunner of the scien¬ 
tific ; that in the race, no less than in the indi¬ 
vidual, doubt must intervene between belief and 
knowledge. 

We shall now briefly consider Mr. Buckle’s 
fourth fundamental law, — that “ the great enemy 
of civilization is the protective spirit; or in other 
words, t4 the notion that society cannot prosper, 
unless the affairs of life are watched over and pro¬ 
tected, at nearly every turn, by the state and the 
church,—the state teaching men what they are to 
do, and the church teaching them what they are 
to believe.” 1 Here, as in the foregoing case, Mr. 
Buckle errs only in stating his law without any 
limitations, as if it were a universal one. It can¬ 
not be questioned that for several centuries the 
protective spirit has been extremely prejudicial to 
progress. The notion that government ought to 
control the actions and beliefs of men has, when 
carried into politics, furnished a plea for despot¬ 
ism, and when carried into theology it has been 
productive of intolerance and persecution. Mr. 
Buckle devotes a large portion of his work to the 
establishment and elucidation of this fact. He 


i Vol. ii. p. l. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies . 193 

shows that government and legislation are incom¬ 
petent to direct the affairs of men. He shows 
that politicians have injured trade by interfering 
with it; that legislators have caused smuggling, 
with its attendant crimes; that they have also in¬ 
creased hypocrisy and perjury ; and that, by their 
laws against usury, they have but heightened the 
evil they sought to prevent. He shows that the 
protection of literature by Augustus, by Leo X., 
and by Louis XIY. caused literature to decline. 
In each case “there was much apparent splen¬ 
dour, immediately succeeded by sudden ruin.” 1 
The system of protecting literature was carried 
to its fullest extent by Louis XIY., and nowhere 
can we see more clearly the baneful effects of 
such a course. For the scientific progress which 
had been so marked in the reign of Louis XIII. 
stopped forthwith. Descartes and Pascal, Fer¬ 
mat, Gassendi, Riolan, Joubert, and Par6 died, 
and left no successors. Nothing was done in as^ 
tronomy, in chemistry, in physiology, or in bot¬ 
any. Of mechanical inventions there were none. 
Even the fine arts soon began to decline ; and in¬ 
tellectual decay, the natural consequence of pat¬ 
ronage, was seen in every department of thought 
So in many other cases we see the damage en- 
i Vol. i. p. 647. 


13 


194 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

tailed by the interference of government. Laws 
fixing a minimum of wages have caused thousands 
of labourers to be turned out of employment. 1 
Laws regulating marriage have ended in increas¬ 
ing the number of illegitimate births. 2 Laws for 
the establishment of sanitary supervision have 
spread disease, and lengthened out the mortality 
returns. 3 Laws for the support of colonial gov¬ 
ernment have given rise to the most barbarous 
tyranny. 4 Trade-union projects, economic exper¬ 
iments, poor-laws, education - laws, church-laws, 
currency-laws, have all turned out to be failures, 
and in many cases have inflicted upon society pos¬ 
itive misery, instead of conferring upon it positive 
benefit. Paradoxical as all this may at first seem, 
it is but a statement of historic facts. 5 Modern 
history is filled with similar examples, all show¬ 
ing the utter incompetence of government to reg¬ 
ulate the affairs of men. The duty of govern¬ 
ment is to insure the fulfilment of the first prin¬ 
ciple of morality, — that no man shall infringe 

1 As in the case of the Spitalfields weavers in 1773. 

2 As in Bavaria. 

s As in England, some years ago, during the cholera pestilence. 

4 As in the case of the East India Company, and of the American 
Colonies before the Revolution. 

5 See the evidence in Spencer’s Social Statics , pp. 195-406, and m 
Mr. Buckle’s volumes. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


195 


upon another’s sphere of action. If it but per¬ 
forms its duty, it will do well. But when it goes 
to making plans for securing the “ greatest hap¬ 
piness to the greatest number,” it usually con¬ 
trives to end up by securing the least happiness 
to every one, having failed in its projects, and 
neglected its proper function meanwhile. 

But on looking back and contemplating society 
in its primitive state, we shall arrive at very dif¬ 
ferent conclusions. We shall perceive that the 
protective spirit, far from being prejudicial to 
progress, was one of its most essential conditions. 
Indeed, on calling to mind all those centuries 
of primeval history, when there was nothing to 
counteract the workings of the protective spirit, 
and when all things conspired to strengthen its 
power, one might reasonably ask at the outset 
why it was that under such circumstances the 
human race made such sure and unceasing prog¬ 
ress ; why it was that it progressed at all; why 
it was that it did not even retrograde. If the 
protective spirit is of necessity in every age the 
enemy of civilization, how did it happen that we 
ever emerged from a state of barbarism ? How 
comes it that we have not remained uncivilized, 
mere nomads, or at best diggers of earth, living 
from-hand to mouth, little better, on the whole. 


196 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

than a race of chimpanzees? For Mr. Buckle’s 
own facts show that the protective spirit has 
never been so strong as in the early ages of his¬ 
tory. “ In India, slavery, abject, eternal slavery, 
was the natural state of the great body of the 
people.” 1 The “ vast social system ” of Egypt 
was “ based on despotism ” and “ upheld by cru¬ 
elty.” 2 In Mexico and Peru, “there was the 
same utter absence of anything approaching to 
the democratic spirit: there was the same des¬ 
potic power on the part of the upper classes, and 
the same contemptible subservience on the part 
of the lower.” 3 Again, in Babylonia, Assyria, 
and Persia, despotism was the only form of gov¬ 
ernment ever experienced or thought of. 4 We 
have evidence of the same in the case of China 
and Japan. We find, moreover, that in barba¬ 
rous countries, like Ashantee, despotism univer¬ 
sally prevails. Going still lower, still farther 
back, we see nomadic tribes always in subjec¬ 
tion to the will of the strong man. Now, for 
many thousands of years, 5 civilization was advanc- 

i Vol. i. p. 73. 2 Mid- P- 83. 

3 Ibid. p. 101. In Peru, according to Mr. Prescott, the people 
could not even change their dress without a license from their rulers! 

4 The passage in Herodotus, b. iii. c. 80-83, is well known to have 
Bo historical value ; see the remarks of Rawlinson, vol. ii. p. 393. 

6 Bunsen’s Egypt , passim. Darwin, Origin of Species , p. 23. 


Mr . Buckle s Fallacies . 


197 


ing in Egypt; Babylonia, Persia, and many oi 
the other nations above-mentioned made consider¬ 
able progress; India even arrived at a high state 
of refinement, as is witnessed by her extensive and 
magnificent literature. All this shows that in 
early times progress did co-exist with the strongest 
possible manifestation of the protective spirit; 
and when we consider that there was nothing then 
to counterbalance the workings of the protective 
spirit, that all physical causes contributed to fa¬ 
vour its development, 1 and that scepticism, the 
only thing that could have weakened it, did not 
exist, we may suspect that the protective spirit 
could not have been so detrimental to the interests 
of civilization as Mr. Buckle supposes. 

On looking at the matter deductively, it will 
even appear that without the protective spirit 
there could have been no civilization. For what 
but the most absolute despotism and the pro- 
foundest awe of the ruling power could ever have 
kept together the communities of the primitive 
men, with their cannibalism, their bloodthirsti¬ 
ness, their dishonesty and treachery ? As long as 
men could not live together peaceably, as long 
as they neither knew nor practised the first prin¬ 
ciples of morality, there must have been some 


1 Buckle, vol. 1 . chap. 2. 


198 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

power sufficient to keep society from falling to 
pieces, or there could have been no progress at 
all; and the only such power conceivable was 
that total subjection of the many to the few 
which constitutes the protective system of gov¬ 
ernment. As long as Persians mutilated each 
other, and Carthaginians burned their children, 
and Chinamen beat to death their wives; as 
long as Hindus practised thuggee, and Spartans 
practised stealing, and Ionians practised piracy, 
there must have been “ Drakonian statutes writ¬ 
ten in blood,” there must have been absolute des¬ 
potism. Without this, society would have become 
a parcel of units. Imagine a republic of Tatars, 
a constitutional democracy of Vandals, and de¬ 
velop the consequences! 

Thus in the primitive stage of civilization the 
protective spirit played the same part as universal 
credulity in preserving society from disintegration. 
Thus it becomes more evident than before that 
scepticism would have been harmful at that early 
period. It would have weakened the protective 
spirit and destroyed allegiance, besides causing 
religious dissension. Nothing of the kind was 
then admissible. The selfish and brutal feelings 
of men had to be restrained, and their social and 
humane feelings called forth, before the sceptical 


Mr, Buckle's Fallacies, 199 

spirit could safely commence its inroads upon the 
spirit of universal belief and universal submissioru 
The protective spirit was therefore in early times 
the great safeguard of civilization and the all¬ 
essential condition of progress; and this very 
important restriction must be placed upon Mr c 
Buckle’s law. 

On looking at the subject in its broadest and 
most general aspect, we shall arrive at the conclu¬ 
sion that all systems of belief and all great instk 
tutions are beneficial when they first spring up. 
Each has its functions to perform, and the more 
carefully we study history the more deeply shall 
we be convinced that it performs it in the best 
possible manner. But after these beliefs and in¬ 
stitutions have done their work and are no longer 
needed, after they have been stereotyped in life¬ 
less forms, then it is that they become produc¬ 
tive of evil and are prejudicial to the interests of 
mankind. 

With the help of these considerations, we can 
more completely understand Mr. Buckle’s two 
propositions. With the restrictions here placed 
upon them, they might be stated thus : in the 
revolutionary period of modern society, scepticism 
has been uniformly essential to progress, and the 
protective spirit has been uniformly detrimental 


200 Darwinism and Other Essays, 
to it. This is strictly true, and needs no qualifi¬ 
cation. 

In his second volume our author develops an¬ 
other fundamental law, which we have not time 
to consider here. It may be stated thus: in a 
country where the deductive method of investiga- 
tion prevails, there will be a much greater differ¬ 
ence in the intellectual and social condition of the 
upper and lower classes than in a country where 
the inductive method is the prevalent one. This 
may be illustrated by comparing Greece, Ger¬ 
many, and Scotland, on the one hand, with Eng¬ 
land and the United States on the other. The 
application of this law in the case of Germany 
and America is to be contained in the third vol¬ 
ume. 

In conclusion, we must say a few words in re¬ 
gard to Mr. Buckle’s application of his four great 
laws. The application of the first runs through 
the whole work. In every chapter we are met by 
numberless illustrations of the law that the prog¬ 
ress of humanity conforms to the progress of 
opinion. It is different, however, in the case of 
the second law which we have discussed. Mr. 
Buckle appears entirely to forget his theoretical 
neglect of the moral element in our nature, and 
to take it practically into account as much as any 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


201 


one else. In his delineations of wars, civil revolu¬ 
tions, and especially of religious persecutions, he 
seems to believe in spite of himself that “ moral 
feelings ” do exercise as much power over men as 
“ intellectual acquisitions ; ” and that the effects 
produced by the former are quite as lasting as 
those produced by the latter. He repeatedly rec¬ 
ognizes the fact that our desires and impulses in¬ 
fluence us strongly in the acceptance and defence 
of opinions. In speaking of the Scotch clergy, 
he attributes their tyrannical enforcement of su¬ 
perstitious notions to an inordinate desire for 
power, not to a mistaken interest in the welfare 
of others. After noticing the profound reverence 
of the Scotch people for their clergy, he observes: 
“ It is not surprising that the clergy, who at no 
period and in no nation have been remarkable 
for their meekness, or for a want of confidence in 
themselves, should, under circumstances so emi¬ 
nently favourable to their pretensions, have been 
somewhat elated, and should have claimed an 
authority even greater than that which was con¬ 
ceded to them. ... It was generally believed that 
whoever gainsaid the clergy would be visited, not 
only with temporal penalties, but also with spir¬ 
itual ones. For such a crime, there was punish¬ 
ment here, and there was punishment hereafter. 


202 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

The preachers willingly fostered a delusion by 
which they benefited. . . • They did not scruple to 
affirm that, by their censures, they could open and 
shut the kingdom of heaven. . . . The clergy, 
intoxicated by the possession of power, reached 
to such a pitch of arrogance that they did not 
scruple to declare that whoever respected Christ 
was bound, on that very account, to respect them. 

. . . Such was their conceit, and so greedy were 
they after applause, that they would not allow 
even a stranger to remain in their parish, unless 
he, too, came to listen to what they chose to say. 

. . . How they laboured to corrupt the national 
intellect , and how successful they were in that 
base vocation, has been hitherto known to no 
modern reader.” 1 He also tells us that the 
Scotch clergy used “ means of intimidation,” be¬ 
cause, being “ perfect masters of their own art,” 
they well knew that “ by increasing the appre¬ 
hensions to which the ignorance and timidity of 
men make them too liable ” they would also “ in¬ 
crease their eagerness to fly for support to their 
spiritual advisers.” 2 

All this is very significant. It shows that Mr. 
Buckle is unable to escape from recognizing the 

1 Vol. ii. pp. 344, 347, 348, 357, 365. 

2 Ibid. pp. 366, 384. 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 


208 


enormous influence of feeling in leading to belief 
and action. After labouring to sliow that perse¬ 
cutors are actuated only by mistaken benevolence, 
he here declares that the tyrannical and intolerant 
acts of the Scotch clergy were dictated by cun¬ 
ning selfishness and long-sighted craft. We think 
that he here commits almost as great an error 
as before, though in the opposite direction, by at¬ 
tributing too much to the selfish desires of these 
men, and by taking too little account of their 
good, but mistaken, intentions. There is glaring 
inconsistency in this : but when a man lays down 
a “ law ” so incredibly absurd as the one in ques¬ 
tion, we must expect to find him inconsistent in 
its application. 

But Mr. Buckle devotes by far the largest por¬ 
tion of his work, thus far, to the illustration of his 
third and fourth laws. As he treats only of the 
revolutionary period, his illustrations are all ap¬ 
propriate and forcible. We lack words to express 
our admiration of these profound and instructive 
chapters. The inquiry into the history of the 
intellect in England, France, Spain, and Scotland 
shows an extent of learning and a depth of thought 
unsurpassed, so far as we know, in historical liter¬ 
ature. Our author traces the rise of scepticism 
and the decline of the royal power in England, 


204 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

the workings of the protective spirit in England 
and France, the causes, remote and proximate, of 
the French Revolution, all with the most consum¬ 
mate skill. In the case of Spain, he sets before 
us in vivid colours the utter impotence of govern- 
ment to direct social progress. He describes in 
bold outlines the course of philosophic investiga¬ 
tion among the Scotch, and the influence of their 
habits of thought upon their general condition. 
Everywhere, in this part of the work, we see the 
touches of a master; everywhere we find some¬ 
thing to instruct and entertain. Had Mr. Buckle 
written nothing more, these chapters alone would 
suffice to make his name immortal. Considered 
merely as historic pictures they rival anything in 
Gibbon or Grote. 

We have not criticized at length Mr. Buckle’s 
first law, because we have no restrictions to place 
upon it, and because it may be found demons¬ 
trated, as completely as possible, in Mr. Buckle’s 
own work. As the result of our examination into 
his other laws, we have found that the second 
contains no truth whatever, being supported by a 
tangled chain of sophisms, every link in which is 
unsound; but that the third and fourth are strictly 
true, if limited to the period of which Mr. Buckle 
treats. The first law did not originate with him, 


Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 205 

and the second he has failed to establish; but the 
third and fourth may take their places as impor¬ 
tant additions to our knowledge of human history. 
This is the lasting service which Mr. Buckle has 
already rendered to science. 

With respect to the tendency of Mr. Buckle’s 
work, an unprejudiced mind can have but one 
opinion. It is calculated to awaken independent 
thought, and to diffuse a spirit of scientific in¬ 
quiry. Written in an easy and elegant style, it 
will be read with pleasure by many who would 
not otherwise have the patience to go through 
with the subjects of which it treats. Thus, grand 
and startling in its views, impressive and charm¬ 
ing in its eloquence, it cannot fail to arouse many 
a slumbering mind to intellectual effort. Such 
has its tendency already been, and such it will 
continue to be. Indeed, with Mr. Buckle’s dili¬ 
gence, his honesty, his freedom of thought, his 
bold outspokenness, his hearty admiration for 
whatever is good and great in man, the tendency 
of his work could not well be otherwise. All 
these are qualities which will be remembered 
when his inaccuracies and errors, however great, 
shall be forgotten. And whatever may be thought 
about the correctness or incorrectness of Mr. 


206 


Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Buckle’s opinions, the world cannot be long in 
coming to the conclusion that his “History of 
Civilization in England ” is a great and noble 
book, written by a great and noble man. 

September, 1861. 


XI. 


POSTSCRIPT ON MR. BUCKLE . 1 

The pilgrimage of an “ infidel ” to Mount Sinai 
and the tomb of Christ affords a suggestive theme 
for meditation. It is with no disparaging intent 
that we use the vague epithet “ infidel,” for Mr. 
Stuart-Glennie is himself most explicit in assur¬ 
ing us that neither with Christianity nor with 
what he calls “ Christianism ” does he acknowl¬ 
edge any fellowship or alliance. By Christianity 
he means “ that great historical system which 
culminated in the philosophy of Scholasticism, 
the religion of Catholicism, and the polity of Feu¬ 
dalism ; ” and by Christianism he means “ that 
historical theory which represents Jesus of Naza¬ 
reth as a supernatural being, who came on earth 
for the good of mankind, was put to death, and 
rose again to sit on the right hand of God.” The 
historical system Mr. Stuart-Glennie perceives to 

1 Pilgrim Memories; or, Travel and Discussion in the Birth- 
Countries of Christianity with the late Henry Thomas Buckle. By 

John S. Stuart-Glennie, M. A. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 
1875. 


208 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

have come to an end, and the historical theory he 
has learned to regard as antiquated and unsound, 
and he therefore frankly declares himself an op¬ 
ponent of Christianity, and stigmatizes as dishon¬ 
est all description of the Christian religion as a 
morality, or sentiment, or ethical impulse. With 
the same frankness he expresses himself about 
beliefs which “ Christianism ” has always held 
dear, in language, and still more in a tone, calcu¬ 
lated to exasperate the Christian world to the 
last degree, so that a leading orthodox reviewer 
has been led to recognize in him the “ fool ” de¬ 
scribed by the Psalmist who has “ said in his 
heart that there is no God.” This is, however, 
inaccurate, for Mr. Stuart-Glennie is certainly no 
atheist. It is the very purity and sensitiveness 
of his theistic instinct that leads him, like Theo¬ 
dore Parker, to condemn as degrading much that 
still finds a place in popular theology. One 
might, indeed, even plausibly question the pro¬ 
priety of Mr. Stuart-Glennie classifying himself 
as an anti-Christian, were it not that he is so ex¬ 
plicit in defining what he rejects as Christianity. 
But, in truth, such questions of nomenclature are 
idle, for “ Christian ” is a word of such wide and 
vague connotations that, however well adapted 
It may be for various religious uses, it possesses 


Postscript on Mr . Buckle . 209 

hardly more defining value than such a word as 
“ philosophical; ” and whether a given set of opin¬ 
ions can be grouped under such rubric or not has 
become a point hardly worth arguing. 

While mainly a personal narrative, this book 
of “ Pilgrim Memories ” keeps certain ulterior 
ends in view. The author has projected, and in 
part executed, an extensive series of works to be 
entitled u The Modern Revolution,” in which noth¬ 
ing less is aimed at than the establishment of a 
new law of history, a new speculative basis for 
religion, and a new point of departure for dra¬ 
matic art. The new law of history and the new 
speculative basis for religion we are to seek in 
the conception of historic development as “ a cer¬ 
tain Change, and Process of Change, in men’s no¬ 
tions of the Causes of Change.” One object of 
the present volume is to show how this concep¬ 
tion took shape in the author’s mind in the course 
of his journeyings and discussions with Mr. 
Buckle. By the Gulf of Ezion-Gebir, “ walking 
or riding along a shell- and coral-covered strand : 
on our right the sea, red with the coralline for¬ 
ests of its depths, and with a margin so bright 
and clear that, as we rode, we saw all its gem¬ 
like pavement; on our left sandstone precipices 
of the most magnificently-varied hues,” — amid 
14 


210 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

this strangely beautiful scene we enter upon quite 
a Platonic dialogue, in which the author seeks to 
expound his new conception of causation, while 
Mr. Buckle occasionally interposes with “I do 
not follow you, I confess,” or “ That seems philo¬ 
sophical enough,” quite after the manner of the 
< fiaLveraL or ovk e/xotye Sokcl of Sokrates and his in¬ 
terlocutors. This long conversation, or series of 
conversations, is perhaps the most interesting por¬ 
tion of the book. Yet Mr. Buckle evidently does 
not get a thorough hold of what Mr. Stuart-Glen- 
nie means by defining causation as involving “not 
merely the conception of Uniformity of Sequence,” 
but also that of “Mutuality of Coexistence, or 
Mutual Determination ; ” and we must confess 
that to us also his meaning seems by no means 
distinctly set forth or adequately elucidated. It is 
to be hoped that in future volumes this point will 
be thoroughly cleared up, for we are told that the 
“ Change in our conceptions of the Causes of 
Change,” which the author has discovered to be 
the “ Ultimate Law of History,” is neither more 
nor less than “ an advance from the conception of 
One-sided Determination to that of Mutual De¬ 
termination.” That this statement is fraught 
with meaning for Mr. Stuart-Glennie there can 
be no doubt; he recurs to it again and again, as if 


Postscript on Mr. Buckle. 211 

it were a sort of talismanic formula for the solu¬ 
tion of all manner of problems, psychological and 
historical. But it is just one of those formulas, 
like Mr. Spencer’s famous law of the change from 
incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity, 
that needs to be charged with significance by 
means of copious preliminary explanation in or¬ 
der to convey any sense at all to the mind of the 
reader. 

To the many readers who, some twenty years 
since, were interested in what then bid fair to be 
the “biggest of big books,” the most attractive 
pages in Mr. Stuart-Glennie’s volume will be 
those which give us glimpses of the personal pe¬ 
culiarities of Mr. Buckle. The sad story of Mr. 
Buckle’s fruitless journey in quest of health, the 
rapid decay of his strength, and his untimely death 
at Damascus has long been generally known, but 
it acquires fresh interest from the fuller ac¬ 
count now given by his fellow - pilgrim. Few 
would now rate the value of Mr. Buckle’s work, 
or the loss to science from his premature end, so 
highly as they were commonly rated at the time. 
Yet, as a fresh instance of how life is short while 
art is long, of how the world passes away from 
us while yet we are stammering over the alpha¬ 
bet of its mysteries, there is something infinitely 


212 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

pathetic in the cry which went up from the ex¬ 
hausted and fever-stricken traveller: “ My book, 
my book ! I shall never finish my book ! ” The 
pathos is not diminished, but perhaps rather deep¬ 
ened, by the reflection that the book possessed no 
such transcendent value as its author ascribed to 
it, and that in all probability the strange irony of 
fate, had it granted to Mr. Buckle the long life of 
a Carlyle or a Humboldt, would only have per¬ 
mitted him to survive his own reputation as a 
leader in the world of thought. It is seldom that 
so brilliant a success as Mr. Buckle’s has been 
even temporarily achieved by such superficial 
thinking and such slender scholarship. The im¬ 
mense array of authors cited in his book bears 
witness to the extent of his reading, but the loose, 
indiscriminate way in which they are cited shows 
equally how uncritical and ^desultory his reading 
was. One may ascribe this looseness to the na¬ 
tive impatience of temperament illustrated in his 
disposing of Gibbon and Hallam in ten days; but 
certainly his solitary education and solitary habits 
of study could do little towards curing the fault. 
One reason why the scholarship of university- 
bred men is in the main so far superior to that of 
men who have been taught at home is that the 
former are regularly forced, by continual contact 


Postscript on Mr. Buckle . 213 

and rivalry with fellow-students, into habits of 
self-restraint and self-criticism in reaching con¬ 
clusions which only the rarest innate virtues of 
intellect can enable the latter now and then, in 
spite of their solitude, to acquire. It is but once 
or twice in an age that the home-taught student 
can receive the stimulus to patient sagacity that 
was afforded in the cases of Grote and Mill. The 
kind of unceasing criticism which university-life 
affords the best means of securing is in most cases 
indispensable. Less effective, because less direct 
and constant, but still very valuable, is the disci¬ 
pline that is gained by early and frequent author¬ 
ship, where a writer is so constituted as to be able 
to profit alike by fair and unfair public criticism. 
That there may be men of genius with such 
marked native qualities of caution and vigilance 
as to enable them partially to dispense with such 
educational aids we do not deny ; but Mr. Buckle 
was not one of these. He began life with his full 
share of the “ original sin ” of hasty generaliza¬ 
tion ; and nothing in his circumstances tended to 
check or control this disposition until, at an age 
when one’s mental habits are usually pretty well 
ingrained, he appeared before the world with the 
first instalment of his able and stimulating but 
crude and hastily-wrought book. 


214 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Not only did Mr. Buckle’s impatient and un¬ 
critical habit prevent his vast reading from re¬ 
sulting in sound scholarship, but his lack of sub¬ 
tlety and precision were so marked as to stamp 
all his thinking with the character of shallowness. 
He seized readily upon the broader and vaguer 
distinctions among things, the force of which the 
ordinary reader feels most strongly and with least 
mental effort, and of such raw material, without 
further analysis, and without suspecting the need 
for further analysis, he constructed his historical 
theories. To this mode of proceeding, aided by 
his warmth of temperament and the lavish pro¬ 
fusion of his illustrations, he undoubtedly owed 
the great though ephemeral success which his 
book attained. The average reader is much sooner 
stimulated by generalizations that are broad and 
indistinct than by such as are subtle and precise; 
and if we stop to consider why Mr. Buckle’s name 
has been sometimes associated with those of men 
so far beyond his calibre as Mill and Darwin, we 
may see the reason in the fact that Mr. Buckle 
could be entirely grasped by many of those very 
admirers of the latter writers who least appreciate 
or fathom their finest and deepest mental quali¬ 
ties. But this essentially superficial character of 
Mr. Buckle’s thought is shown not only in his ob- 


Postscript on Mr. Buckle. 215 

tuseness to subtle distinctions, but even more con¬ 
spicuously in his utter failure to seize upon any 
deeply significant but previously hidden relations 
among facts, in the work which he put forth as 
the “ Novum Organum ” of historical science. 

If we contrast his book with some of the really 
great books which were contemporary with it, 
such as Mr. Darwin’s “ Origin of Species,” Mr. 
Spencer’s “ Principles of Psychology,” or Sir 
Henry Maine’s “Ancient Law,” the difference is 
striking enough. Each of these works set forth 
old facts in new and hitherto unsuspected connec¬ 
tions, and in so doing enunciated thoughts which 
have quite changed the aspect of the questions 
with which they deal. There is not a naturalist 
in either continent to-day whose most specific in¬ 
quiries do not bear some more or less conscious 
reference to what is known as “ the Darwinian 
theory.” The time-honoured contest represented 
by Locke and Leibnitz, or by Hume and Kant, 
is beginning to take a new point of departure, 
owing to Mr. Spencer’s suggestion of the acquire¬ 
ment of mental faculties through inheritance and 
slow variation; and Sir Henry Maine’s lucid ex¬ 
position of early ideas regarding contract, prop¬ 
erty, and family relationship obliges us to look at 
all the phenomena of society from an altered 


216 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

standpoint. But, in marked contrast with works 
of this kind, we find in Mr. Buckle’s book sundry 
commonplace reflections of quite limited value or 
applicability, such as the statements that scepti¬ 
cism is favourable to progress, or that over-legis¬ 
lation is detrimental to society. No doubt such 
commonplaces might be so treated as to acquire 
the practical value of new contributions to his¬ 
tory. But to treat them so requires subtle analy¬ 
sis of the facts generalized, and all that Mr. 
Buckle did was to collect miscellaneous evidences 
for the statements in their rough, ready-made 
form. Of generalizations that go below the sur¬ 
face of things, such as Comte’s suggestive though 
indefensible “ Law of the Three Stages,” we find 
none in Mr. Buckle. The only attempt at such 
an analytic theory is the generalization concern¬ 
ing the moral and intellectual factors in social 
progress, wherein Mr. Buckle’s looseness and fu¬ 
tile vagueness of thought is shown perhaps more 
forcibly than anywhere else in his writings. It 
is not of such stuff as this that a science of historic 
phenomena can be wrought. 

In Mr. Stuart-Glennie’s reminiscences, which 
seem to be most carefully and honestly reported, 
these characteristics of Mr. Buckle — his warm, 
impatient temperament and his lack of mental 


Postscript on Mr. Buckle. 217 

subtlety or deep penetration — are continually 
brought to our notice ; and all the more forcibly 
because of the absence of any such intent on the 
part of the fellow-pilgrim to whom we owe these 
interesting notes of discussion. To examine the 
details of these conversations would carry us be¬ 
yond our limits, and would hardly be justified by 
their intrinsic importance. One little point we 
must note as characteristic, with regard to Mr. 
Buckle’s temperament as a historian. While Mr. 
Stuart-Glennie seems to have his whole soul stirred 
within him by the historic associations clustering 
about the places visited, and is moved to reflec¬ 
tions always interesting and often suggestive, Mr. 
Buckle, on the other hand, though sufficiently 
alive to the beauties of nature, seems quite ob¬ 
livious to historic memories. At the sepulchre 
of Christ his thoughts were mainly on political 
economy, “ the state of society and the habits of 
the people.” In such trivial details some light is 
thrown, perhaps, on that lack of intellectual sym¬ 
pathy with the past which was one of Mr. Buckle’s 
most notable defects as a historian. 

But with all this intellectual narrowness and 
looseness of texture, the narrative gives one a 
very pleasant impression of Mr. Buckle person¬ 
ally, and, furthermore, enables one to comprehend 


218 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

how, with such slight qualifications, he should 
have become so interesting to the world. One 
leaves Mr. Stuart-Glennie’s book with the regret 
experienced on parting with intelligent and kindly 
companions. As we close it and lay it aside, we 
feel that yet another charming moment of our 
reading-life has gone to be numbered with the 
things of the past. 


March , 1876. 



XII. 


THE EACES OF THE DANUBE. 

In the famous Eastern Question, which so long 
has disturbed the peace of Europe, may be noted 
two aspects of a process which, under great va¬ 
riety of conditions, has been going on over Eu¬ 
ropean territory ever since the dawn of authentic 
history. The formation of a nationality — that 
is, of a community of men sufficiently connected 
in interests and disciplined in social habits to live 
together peacefully under laws of their own mak¬ 
ing— has been the leading aspect of this pro¬ 
cess, in which the work of civilization has hitherto 
largely consisted. But along with this, as a cor¬ 
relative aspect, has gone the pressure exerted 
against the community by an external mass of 
undisciplined barbarism, ever on the alert to 
break over the fluctuating barrier that has warded 
it off from the growing civilization, ever threat¬ 
ening to undo the costly work which this has 
accomplished. Though the enemy has at times 
appeared in the shape of unmitigated tribal bar- 


220 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

barism, — as in the invasion of Huns in the fifth 
century and of Mongols in the thirteenth, — and 
at other times in the shape of an inferior type 
of civilization, as exemplified by the Arabs and 
Turks, the principle involved has always been 
the same. In every case the stake has been the 
continuance of the higher civilization, though the 
amount of risk has greatly varied, and in recent 
centuries has come to be very slight. At the pres¬ 
ent day the military strength of mankind is al¬ 
most entirely monopolized by the higher civili¬ 
zation, and it is no longer in danger of being 
overwhelmed by external violence. But when 
the Greeks confronted a social organization of 
inferior type at Marathon and at Salamis, the 
danger was considerable ; and in pre-historic times 
it may well have happened more than once that 
some germ of a progressive polity has been swept 
away in a torrent of conquering barbarism. 

Until the rise of the Roman power the chief 
military business of the cultivated community had 
been to drive oft the barbarian, to slaughter him, 
or reduce him to slavery ; but the more profound 
policy of Rome transformed him, whenever it was 
possible, into a citizen, and enlisted his fighting 
power on the side of progress. From the conquest 
of Spain by Scipio to the subjugation of Central 


221 


The Races of the Danube . 

Germany by Charles the Great, this is the most 
conspicuous feature of Roman history. The area 
of stable nationality in Europe was continually 
enlarged, and the frontier to be defended against 
wild tribes was gradually shortened and pushed 
eastward to the Lower Danube. In the time of 
Marius, the Gaul and the German were enemies 
who might possibly undo all the good work that 
had been begun. But the Gaul very quickly be¬ 
came a thorough Roman in his habits and inter¬ 
ests, forgetting even his native language; and the 
German tribes, as they acquired a foothold, one 
after another, within the limits of the Empire, 
became so far assimilated that the transformation 
of the Roman structure effected by them was in 
no respect, not even in a political sense, an over¬ 
throw. 

In the turbulent period of the fifth century, 
when the debatable frontier was still at the Rhine 
and Upper Danube, a terrible foe appeared in 
Attila, with his horde of savage Huns ; and it 
was then mainly by the prowess of Gauls and 
Germans, in the memorable battle of Chalons, 
that the security of European civilization was 
decisively guaranteed. So formidable a danger 
has perhaps never since menaced Christendom, 
though Gibbon reckoned the teaching of the 


222 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Koran in Oxford as one of the consequences that 
might have ensued had Charles the Hammer been 
overthrown at Tours by the Arabs. Under the 
grandson of this doughty hero — Charles the 
Great — the entire strength of Germany became 
enlisted in the service of the Christianized Em¬ 
pire, and among the results of this were the con¬ 
version of the newly-arriving Magyars, Poles, and 
Bohemians, and the conquest of Prussia by the 
Teutonic knights. By the thirteenth century the 
fabric of European civilization had become so 
solid that a barbaric power not inferior to Attila’s 
was hardly able to make any impression upon it. 
Batu, with his fifteen hundred thousand Mongols, 
gained a victory at Liegnitz in 1241, such as 
Attila had fought for in vain at Chalons ; but it 
came some centuries too late, for the contest be¬ 
tween stable nationality and nomadic barbarism 
was by this time settled forever. The most the 
greasy Mongol could accomplish was to check for 
a few generations the growth of a national life 
among the Slavic tribes of Russia. 

But though Chalons and Tours demonstrated 
that Christian civilization could hold its own, 
whether against the barbarian or the infidel, the 
latter nevertheless twice succeeded in marking 
serious encroachments on Roman territory. 


223 


The Races of the Danube . 

The first great wave of Mohammedan invasion 
not only swept away the provinces south of the 
Mediterranean, but overwhelmed the greater part 
of Spain, and cut it away from the Empire for 
several centuries. The disastrous effect of this 
long isolation upon the future history of Spain 
lias been often remarked, and if thoroughly 
treated would make an interesting study. Yet 
the contributions of the Mohammedan conquerors 
to the work of human culture, which were by no 
means insignificant, may perhaps be thought to 
have afforded some compensation for the harm 
done. Spain is the only instance of a country 
once thoroughly infused with Homan civilization 
which has been actually severed from the Empire; 
and even here the severance, though of long dura¬ 
tion, was but partial and temporary. After a 
struggle of nearly eight centuries, the higher form 
of social organization triumphed over the lower, 
and the usurping race was expelled. 

Contemporaneously with this final rescue of 
Spanish territory, the second great wave of Mo¬ 
hammedan invasion overflowed the remnants of 
the Byzantine Empire, and seemed for a while to 
threaten the security of Europe. In this second 
invasion, conducted by Turks, there was much 
more of barbarism than in the older invasion of 


224 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

the Arabs, and after allowing for all possible mit¬ 
igating considerations, it seems difficult to regard 
the conquest of Constantinople and the territory 
south of the Danube as anything but a great ca¬ 
lamity. How much or how little capacity for 
renovation, under the influence of modern ideas, 
may have been latent in the Byzantine Empire, 
we now shall never know. But, far as it had 
sunk, politically and socially, toward the Asiatic 
type of a community, its regeneration could 
hardly have been as hopeless an affair as is that 
of its Ottoman successor. In such a society as 
that of the Turks there is, indeed, nothing to re¬ 
generate, but the work of civilization in the Eu¬ 
ropean sense, if it is to be done at all, must be 
begun from the beginning. The very germs of 
constitutionalism, of legality, of government by 
discussion, are wanting there as they have never 
been wanting in any European community in the 
worst of times. This has been the essential vice of 
all the Mussulman civilizations. Their theocratic 
type of constitution crushes out all flexibility of 
mind or individuality of character, and quenches 
all desire of change. For this reason they have 
invariably failed, in the long run, when brought 
into competition with the more mobile societies of 
Europe; and for this reason, in spite of the ro. 


225 


The Races of the Danube. 

mantic splendour and the scientific achievements 
which immortalize the memory of Bagdad and 
Cordova, we must be glad that they have failed. 

There has been neither high romance nor use¬ 
ful performance of any sort to reconcile one to 
the unrighteous dominion which a tribe of Mus¬ 
sulman Tatars has exercised for four centuries 
over some of the fairest provinces of Europe. 
The history of that dominion has been a monoto¬ 
nous display of brute force without any noble ul¬ 
terior purpose which might redeem its vulgarity. 
It is the history of a race politically unteachable 
and intellectually incurious, which has contributed 
absolutely nothing to the common weal of man¬ 
kind, while by its position it has been able to 
check the normal development of a more worthy 
community. 

The provinces which Muhamad II. wrested 
from the Empire had at no time been very thor¬ 
oughly Romanized, and such civilization as they 
had acquired in antiquity had fared but ill amid 
the everlasting turmoil to which their frontier 
position had subjected them. Invading swarms 
from the northeast, when unable to penetrate far¬ 
ther into Europe, halted here and wrangled for 
supremacy, and the ceaseless but ineffectual war¬ 
fare of Avars, Bulgarians, Croats, Serbs, and Mag* 
15 


226 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

yars makes a dreary and unprofitable history. 
On a superficial view this whole region seems po¬ 
litically a Bedlam, as it is linguistically a Babel. 
But — as was hinted at the beginning of this 
paper — the complication of disorder on the lower 
Danube is perhaps no greater than has existed, at 
one time or another, in those parts of Europe 
that are now most thoroughly civilized. All over 
Spain, Gaul, and Britain, and even Italy, the con¬ 
flicts of races have been fierce and their intermix¬ 
tures extremely intricate. But under the organ¬ 
izing impulse of Rome, directed alike by Empire 
and Church, the populations of these countries 
long ago became so far consolidated in general in¬ 
terests and assimilated in manners and speech 
that in each country the old racial differences are 
but occasionally traceable in rural customs and 
patois , and even when plainly traceable have lit¬ 
tle or no political importance. It is a long time 
since the Iberian, the Gaul, the Roman, the Visi¬ 
goth, the Burgundian, the Frank, the Walloon, 
and the Norman disappeared politically in the 
Frenchman; and the Scot, whose slogan for ages 
was “ Death to the Sassenach! ” is to-day the 
most loyal of Britons. Over three fourths of 
western Europe the adoption of Roman speech 
has obliterated old lines of demarcation until it 


The Races of the Danube . 227 

has even become possible to talk about a “ Latin 
race ” ! In like manner the Prussian of Konigs- 
berg, his Lettic mother-tongue forgotten for six 
generations, makes common cheer with the Suevi 
of Stuttgart and the Alemanni of Munich. In 
the border-land of the Danube, on the other hand, 
whatever chance there might have been for any 
such assimilation of races and dialects was cut 
off by perpetual incursions of Tataric tribes pre¬ 
venting the growth of anything like nationality. 
Under some circumstances the pressure exerted 
by a totally alien enemy might serve as a stimu¬ 
lus to national consolidation. But here the va¬ 
rious races were too recently brought together, 
and the pressure of barbaric attack was so great 
as to keep society disorganized. The races of the 
Danube are accordingly still so heterogeneous 
that it is worth while to point out their various 
affinities and give some brief account of their past 
career. 

In order to get a comprehensive view of the 
subject, it is desirable to go back to the begin¬ 
ning and recall the principal features of the settle¬ 
ment of Europe by the people who now possess 
it. According to the most probable opinion, the 
present population of Europe is the result of the 
pre-historic mixture, in varying degrees, of two 


228 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

very different races. The first or Iberian race 
may be regarded as aboriginal in Europe, in the 
sense that we cannot tell how it got there. It 
was a black-haired and dark-skinned race, if we 
may judge from the remnant of it which still 
preserves its primitive language in the isolated 
corner of Spain between the Pyrenees and the 
Bay of Biscay. The second or Aryan race seems 
to have been fair-haired and blue-eyed, and it 
overran Europe in successive swarms, coming 
from the highlands of central Asia, where di¬ 
vers tribes of Tatars have since taken its place. 
The Aryans crowded the Iberians westward, and 
everywhere overcame them (save in the corner 
of Spain just mentioned), and intermingled with 
them, forcing upon them their own speech and 
customs. Thus the language of Europe to-day is 
Aryan, and its legal and social structure is Ar¬ 
yan, but its population is a mixture of Aryan 
and Iberian. In the extremities of Europe as 
looked at from Asia — in the three southern 
peninsulas, in Gaul, and in western and north¬ 
ern Britain—the dark aboriginal type predomi¬ 
nates; while in Scandinavia, northern Germany, 
and northern Russia the blonde type of the in¬ 
vaders remains in the ascendant. It is owing to 
this mixture of strongly contrasted races that the 


The Races of the Danube, 229 

peoples of Europe present such marked varieties 
of complexion. 

So much, at least, is probable, though more 
or less hypothetical. In following the successive 
stages of Aryan invasion, we gradually emerge 
from this twilight of plausible hypothesis into the 
clearness of authentic history. The Aryans came, 
as just observed, in successive swarms. The first 
series of swarms got naturally the most mixed up 
with the Iberian aborigines, and the result of 
their gradual settlement was the formation of the 
Keltic, Italic, and Hellenic peoples. In Spain the 
aborigines held their own most successfully, and 
hence the mixture was recent enough to be rec¬ 
ognized by Roman historians, who called the 
Spaniards Kelt-Iberians; but elsewhere it was 
accomplished so early as to be forgotten before 
people began to write history. It has been fash¬ 
ionable to sneer at zealous Irish writers for their 
propensity to find traces of the Kelts everywhere. 
But there is no doubt whatever that the Kelts 
were once a very widely diffused people. They 
have left names for rivers and mountains in al¬ 
most every part of Europe. The name of the 
river Don in Russia, for example, is one of the 
common Keltic names for water, and so we find 
a river Don in Yorkshire, a Dean in Nottingham- 


230 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

shire, a Dane in Cheshire, and a Dun in Lincoln¬ 
shire. The same name appears in the Rho -dan- 
us, or Rhone, in Gaul; the Eri-t?an-us, or Po, in 
Italy; as well as in the Zbi-ieper, Dniester, and 
Dan- ube; and even in the Ar e-don in the Cau¬ 
casus. This is one example out of hundreds by 
which we trace the former ubiquity of the Kelts, 
who as late as the Christian era were present in 
large numbers as far east as Bohemia. 

The second series of invading Aryan swarms 
consisted of Germans, who began by pushing the 
Kelts westward, and ended by overrunning a great 
part of their territory and mixing with them to a 
considerable extent. There is some German blood 
in Spain, and a good deal in France and northern 
Italy ; and the modern English, while Keltic at 
bottom, are probably half Teutonic in blood, as 
they are predominantly Teutonic in language and 
manners. The Vandals, Goths, Alemanni, Suevi, 
Burgundians, Lombards, Franks, Saxons, and 
Normans, who invaded and reconstructed the 
Roman Empire between the fifth and eleventh 
centuries, were all Germans, and there is no rea¬ 
son to suppose that they differed except in their 
tribal names. From the fifth century onward 
these Germans encroached upon the territory of 
the Empire, mainly because they were pushed 


The Races of the Danube . 231 

forward by Aryan Slavs and Tataric Huns who 
attacked them from the east. Throughout the 
classic period of antiquity, and until the fifth 
century after Christ, the Teutonic family appears 
far to the eastward of its present position. In 
the time of Herodotos, and down to the age of 
Constantine, the inhabitants of Thrace — now 
the centre of European Turkey — were blue¬ 
eyed Goths, called Getee by the classic historians. 
Pretty much the whole of Turkey and southern 
Russia were German in those days; and, as Don¬ 
aldson conjectured, it is possible that the people 
known to the ancients as Skythians may have 
been no other than Goths. 

Thus, as if to illustrate how completely all Ar¬ 
yan Europe is made up out of the same race- 
elements, we find that the lower Danube, for at 
least a thousand years, was German territory; 
and, except on the very improbable supposition 
that its old population has been entirely exter¬ 
minated or transferred westward, we have every 
reason to believe that there is much German 
blood there at the present day. 

While this region was still in the hands of the 
Germans, at the beginning of the second century 
after Christ, the legions of the Emperor Trajan 
passed beyond the Danube, and, conquering the 


232 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

country then known as Dacia, formed a perma¬ 
nent settlement there. In 271 the Emperor Au- 
relian, finding the province difficult to defend, 
surrendered it to the Goths, in whose hands it 
remained for a long time a bulwark against the 
incursions of wild tribes from the northeast. 
The Latin language was firmly established over 
this territory, and is spoken to-day, in a modern¬ 
ized form, by six millions of “ Rumans’’ in Wal- 
lachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania. Of this 
population, the Transylvanian Rumans have long 
formed part of the kingdom of Hungary ; the 
rest, under the nominal suzerainty of the Porte, 
are ruled by a German prince of the house of 
Hohenzollern ; and the racial basis of the whole 
is, no doubt, mainly Teutonic, with a considerable 
Roman and still greater Slavic admixture. 

The Slavs make up the third and last division 
of the Aryan conquerors of Europe. Their speech 
has in many respects departed less widely from 
the forms of the common Aryan mother-tongue 
than the speech of the earlier invaders. In phys¬ 
ical characteristics they resemble most closely the 
northern Germans, in whom, with the central 
Russians and Letts, we see perhaps the purest 
specimens of the Aryan race; but in the south 
they have been more or less modified by inter* 


The Races of the Danube. 233 

mixture with various strains of Tataric blood. 
Napoleon’s witticism, however, that you need only 
scratch a Russian to get at the Tatar underneath, 
contained little more wisdom than is usually to be 
found in such smart sayings based on hasty gen¬ 
eralization from inadequate and half-understood 
data. On the whole, the principal intermixture 
of the Slavs has been with their nearest congeners 
and neighbours, the Teutons. Slavonic tribes, 
pushing their way far into the centre of Europe, 
still hold Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, while 
further south, in Carinthia and Istria, the Slav 
country comes up close to the Tyrol and to Ven¬ 
ice. 

In the Middle Ages, this border region, from 
the head of the Adriatic to the mountains of Bo¬ 
hemia, was the seat of everlasting war; and such 
immense numbers of the eastern invaders were 
captured from time to time and sold into slav¬ 
ery in all parts of Germany that their national 
name became the common appellative for wretches 
doomed to involuntary servitude. Such seems to 
have been the origin of our English word “ slave.” 
Until lately it was supposed that the vernacular 
meaning of the national name was “ the glorious,” 
as slava is a common word for “ glory ” in most 
of the Slavonic languages; and frequent comment 


234 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

was made on the curious fate whereby the proud 
name of a noble race of warriors became perverted 
into a common noun to describe the most abject 
condition of humanity. It is very doubtful, how¬ 
ever, whether the striking contrast really exists 
to supply a fit subject for moralizing. It is far 
more probable that the name Slav is connected 
with slovo , “ a word,” and means the “ distinctly- 
speaking people ” as contrasted with the Njemetch , 
or “ talkers of gibberish,” by which polite epi¬ 
thet the Slavic races have always distinguished 
the Germans. This naive assumption, that it is 
ourselves alone who talk intelligibly, while for¬ 
eigners babble a meaningless jargon, has been a 
very common one with uninstructed people, and 
“Njemetch” is not the only national appellative 
that bears witness to its prevalence. The epithet 
“ Welsh,” which the Germans apply to the Ital¬ 
ians, the Dutch to the Belgians, and the English 
to the Kymry of western Britain, has precisely 
the same meaning ; and so had the word “ barba¬ 
rian,” by which the ancient inhabitant of Hellas 
described indiscriminately all people who did not 
speak Greek. 1 

It was about the middle of the fifth century 

1 The name “ Wallach,” by which the Germans designate the ift 
habitants of Rumania, is the same word as “Welsh.” 


235 


The Races of the Danube . 

that the Slavonic race began to play a part in 
European history. Advancing from what is now 
southern Russia, in the rear of the Tataric hordes 
of Attila, various Slavic tribes overran the prov¬ 
inces of Moesia, Thrace, Illyricum, and Mace¬ 
donia. Overcoming, and, to some extent, crowd¬ 
ing out, the Gothic inhabitants, they were within 
a century firmly established throughout the area 
between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, which 
they have ever since continued to occupy. But, 
far from attempting to set themselves up as an 
independent political power in this territory, they 
were readily brought to acknowledge the sover¬ 
eignty of the Empire. They no more thought of 
overthrowing the dominion of Rome than the 
Germans did: what they were after was a good 
share of its material advantages. To have set up 
a rival imperium would have been quite beyond 
their slender political capacity, and their imagina¬ 
tion did not reach so fat as to conceive the idea. 
So long as they were allowed to retain their for¬ 
cibly-acquired possessions of land and cattle, they 
were quite ready to help to defend the Empire 
against Tataric Avars and other marauders. The 
relations thus knit between the Slavs and the 
government at Constantinople were similar to 
those established between the Germans and the 


236 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

imperial authorities in the West. Slavonic troops 
came to form a large and redoubtable element in 
the eastern armies, and to the infusion of new life 
thus received we may no doubt partly attribute 
the prolonged maintenance of the Byzantine Em¬ 
pire. It is, perhaps, not generally remembered 
that the greatest warrior and one of the most 
illustrious emperors of this part of the Roman 
world were of Slavic origin. The vernacular 
name of which Justinian is the Latin translation 
was Upravda, or “ the Upright; ” and his invin¬ 
cible general Belisarius was a Dardanian Slav 
named Beli-czar, or “the White Prince.” Within 
less than a century after this white prince had 
driven the Goths from Italy, the able Emperor 
Heraclius, contending on the one hand against 
the Persians while menaced on the other by the 
barbaric Avars, invited two Slavic tribes from 
beyond the Danube to aid in expelling the latter 
invaders. These tribes were the Croats and Serbs, 
and they have remained ever since in the lands 
which were then granted them in reward of their 
military services. 

One reason, and perhaps the chief one, why the 
invading Germans and Slavs so readily became 
subjects of the Roman Empire is to be found in 
the fact that they were settled agricultural races, 


237 


The Races of the Danube . 

and not wandering nomads. It may seem odd to 
speak of races as “ settled ” who moved about so 
extensively over the face of Europe within the 
short period of two centuries. But if they wan¬ 
dered, it was only because they were driven by 
enemies in the rear too strong or too numerous 
for them to overcome, not because their mode of 
life obliged them to roam over vast areas in quest 
of the means of subsistence. The profound phi¬ 
lology of the present day has shown that the 
Aryans, while still in their primitive Asiatic 
home, and long before they had become distin¬ 
guishable as Kelts, Graeco-Italians, Teutons, Slavs, 
or Indo-Persians, had advanced beyond the hunt¬ 
ing and exclusively pastoral stages of barbarism, 
and acquired a subsistence partly by tilling the 
soil and partly by the rearing of domestic cattle. 
They possessed even houses and inclosed towns, 
and the rudiments of what Mr. Bagehot calls 
“government by discussion ” were not wholly un¬ 
known to them. The picture of society with 
which we are familiar in the Germania of Tacitus 
and in the Homeric poems represents a condition 
of things in many respects similar to that which 
obtained among the primitive Aryans. In these 
respects they differed widely from the savage 
Tataric hordes which molested them on the east, 


238 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

and to whose attacks, as well as to the unman¬ 
ageable increase in their own numbers, we must 
probably ascribe their gradual and long-continued 
migrations into southern Asia and into Europe. 
When after many centuries those less civilized 
Aryans known as Germans and Slavs were driven 
into collision with their more civilized brethren of 
the Roman Empire, their invasion was in an all- 
important respect very different from the inva¬ 
sions of Huns or Avars. The followers of Alaric, 
Hengist, and Chlodwig came to colonize, whereas 
the followers of Attila came but to riot and de¬ 
stroy. The vandalism of the former was inci¬ 
dental, while that of the latter was fundamental. 

The Teutonic and Slavic invaders, once over 
the first intoxication of victory, began, as by nat¬ 
ural instinct, to found rural estates and cultivate 
tlie soil; and thus becoming property-holders, 
although their title rested on violence, it became 
their interest to assist in preserving the political 
system so far as practicable. The date 476, 
which the old historians made to mark the polit¬ 
ical fall of the Roman Empire, in reality marked 
nothing at all at the time except a paltry intrigue 
by which the German Odoacer, having got rid of 
a faineant emperor who was too near at hand, 
continued to administer the affairs of Italy under 


239 


The Races of the Danube. 

commission from the government at Constantino¬ 
ple. In reality the identity of interests between 
the Teutonic settlers and the imperial system 
became more and more manifest during the three 
following centuries, until it was definitely declared 
in 800 in the coronation of Charles the Great, 
whereby the headship of the western world was 
restored to Rome, while the connection with the 
East was finally severed. 

If we consider the eastern half of the Empire at 
this time — or, at least, so much of it as was com¬ 
prised in Europe, the remainder having been 
mostly torn away by the Saracens — we find it 
undergoing a gradual process of Slavonization 
quite analogous to the Teutonic reconstruction 
which was just culminating in the West. Pretty 
much the whole of what is now European Turkey 
had become filled with a Slavic population. For 
the most part this population had been converted 
to the Greek or so-called Orthodox form of Chris¬ 
tianity, though in remote parts of Serbia pagan¬ 
ism lingered till the thirteenth century. There 
was probably some sense, though slight, of a com¬ 
munity of race throughout the peninsula. The 
interests of the Slavs, on the whole, were con¬ 
cerned in the protection of the imperial system 
against external attack, although the various 


240 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

chiefs made war on each other and mismanaged 
their own affairs with as little sense of allegiance 
to the Byzantine suzerain as the rulers of Brit¬ 
tany or Aquitaine felt for their degenerate Carlo- 
vingian overlords. Thus on a superficial view the 
conditions of order and turbulence, so to speak, 
might have seemed very similar here to what they 
were in the West; and all that was needed for 
the growth of a new national life might seem to 
be the rise of a dominant tribe — after the like¬ 
ness of the Franks — which in due course of time 
should seize the falling Byzantine sceptre and as¬ 
sert unquestioned sway over the whole peninsula. 
Could something like this have happened, the 
Eastern Question would probably never have come 
up to perturb the politics of modern Europe, and 
the entire careers of Russia and Austria must 
have been essentially modified. But for the Hun¬ 
garians, Crim Tatars, and Turks, something of 
this sort might very likely have happened. As it 
was, however, no sooner did one Slavonic com¬ 
munity begin to rise to pre-eminence than some 
fatal combination of invaders proceeded to cripple 
its power, and this state of things continued un¬ 
til the turbaned infidel made an easy prey of the 
whole region. 

In the ninth century the chronic agitation of 


241 


The Races of the Danube . 

eastern Europe was raised to terrible fever-heat 
by the approach of the Hungarians, — a non-Ar¬ 
yan race from central Asia which has had a very 
different career from that of the other non-Aryan 
invaders of Europe. Of all such invaders these 
alone have established a securely permanent foot¬ 
hold, unless we count the cognate Finns, who were 
established in the far North in pre-historic times. 
To keep in his mind a succinct view of these eth¬ 
nological facts, the reader will do well to remem¬ 
ber that all the languages now spoken in Europe 
are Aryan languages descended from a common 
Aryan mother-tongue, with just four exceptions. 
The first of these is the Bask of northwestern 
Spain, sole remnant of the aboriginal Iberian 
speech. The second is the group of Finnic dia¬ 
lects spoken by a Tataric people which has lived 
from time immemorial on the eastern shores of 
the Baltic. The third is the Hungarian, and the 
fourth is the Turkish. These languages have 
absolutely nothing in common with the Aryan, 
either in grammar or vocabulary. The Bask, too, 
has nothing in common with the three other alien 
tongues. But Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish 
are quite nearly related to each other, and there 
is also blood-relationship between the peoples who 
speak these languages. Like the Turks, the Hum 
16 


242 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

garians are a Tatar race ; and there cannot be a 
more striking commentary on the fallaciousness 
of explaining all national peculiarities by a cheap 
reference to “ blood ” than is furnished by these 
two peoples, the one being as highly endowed 
with political good sense as the other is hopelessly 
destitute of it. This is not the place to attempt 
to explain the difference in detail as due to the 
different circumstances amid which the two peo¬ 
ples have been placed ; but there is no doubt that 
their careers have been sufficiently different. In 
the ninth century the Hungarians were as great a 
terror to Christendom as the Turks were in the 
fifteenth ; but the Magyars, after failing to break 
through the bulwark of Christianized Germans, 
which the genius of Charles the Great had pre¬ 
pared for such emergencies, settled down quietly 
in Pannonia — to which they have given the 
name of Hungary — and became converted to the 
Roman form of Christianity. But in the course 
of this settlement the Magyars interfered seri¬ 
ously with the integrity of the Slavonic communi¬ 
ties on the Danube. They tore away a consider¬ 
able portion of Croatia and Serbia, and subjected 
so many Slavic tribes that at the present day the 
Slavs outnumber the Magyars, even within the 
limits of Hungary itself. 1 

1 In 1850 the population of Hungary was thus divided: Magyars, 


243 


The Races of the Danube . 

In calling the Magyars the only non-Aryan in¬ 
vaders who have secured a permanent foothold in 
European territory, I had forgotten, for the mo¬ 
ment, the Bulgars who conquered lower Moesia in 
the beginning of the sixth century. These Bul¬ 
gars were a Tatar race, known also as Ugrians, a 
name of which the “ ogre ” of our nursery stories 
is supposed to be a corruption. But the achieve¬ 
ments of the Bulgars, as a distinct race, were 
hardly of enough consequence to keep them al¬ 
ways in one’s memory. Though they gave the 
name Bulgaria to the Roman province of lower 
Moesia, they were soon absorbed among the Slavs, 
and quite lost their Tataric speech. And so, 
while Bulgaria played a prominent part in med¬ 
ieval history, it figures only as a portion of the 
Slavonic world. Yet to this day, it is said, the 
inhabitants of Bulgaria exhibit, in their high 
cheek-bones, flat face, and sunken eyes, as well as 
in their curious attire, the characteristics of the 
Tatar race. In the seventh century Bulgaria was 
overrun by the Avars, but after these nomads 
were expelled the Bulgarian power developed rap¬ 
idly, and was even extended back over Bessarabia 
and all southern Russia as far as the Sea of Azof. 

5,000,000; Slavs, 6,000,000; Germans and Jews, 1,600,000; Rumans 
in Transylvania, 3,000,000. 


244 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

These eastern conquests were not long retained, 
but on the other hand the semi-independent king¬ 
dom between the Danube and the Balkan Moun¬ 
tains became more and more formidable in its 
rivalry with the imperial government at Constan¬ 
tinople. In long and obstinate warfare the Bul¬ 
garians overcame the Serbs, and by the beginning 
of the tenth century they controlled nearly the 
whole peninsula from the Black Sea to the Adri¬ 
atic. At this epoch their kingdom was perhaps 
as civilized as any in contemporary Europe, if 
literary culture alone were to be taken as a cri¬ 
terion. Their noble youth studied Aristotle and 
Demosthenes in the schools of Constantinople, 
and the subtleties of theological controversy occu¬ 
pied their attention no less than the practice of 
military arts. In a quarrel with the emperor, 
their Czar Simeon laid siege to the capital and 
dictated terms of peace at the Golden Horn. But 
in the next century all this was changed. Such 
arrogant vassals were not to be tolerated. In a 
masterly campaign, though sullied by diabolical 
cruelty, the Emperor Basil II. overthrew the 
power of the Bulgarians, and, subduing the Serbs 
likewise, re-established the immediate authority 
of Constantinople as far as the Danube. 

From this time forth the contest for supremacy 


245 


The Races of the Danube. 

was carried on chiefly between the emperors and 
the Serbian chiefs. The pre-eminence of Serbia 
began about the end of the eleventh century, 
when Urosh was crowned grand duke. By the 
middle of the fourteenth century the whole coun¬ 
try, with the exception of Rumelia or Thrace, was 
in the hands of the Serbians, and it really seemed 
as if the degenerate Greek Empire were about to 
pass into the hands of the Slav. Stephen Dushan, 
of the house of Urosh, a profound statesman and 
consummate general, was the hero who aspired to 
re-enact in the eastern world the part of Charles 
the Great. In 1356 he was proclaimed Emperor 
of the East, and if his life had been spared he 
might have made good the title. But the firm¬ 
ness of his monarchical rule was irritating to his 
turbulent vassals; and like Cassar, William the 
Silent, Henry IV., and Lincoln, he fell by the 
stupid hand of the assassin, just at the time when 
a few years more of life might have been of ines¬ 
timable value to his people and to mankind. 
With the death of the “ Emperor ” Stephen, the 
formation of a Slavic nationality under Serbian 
leadership was indefinitely postponed. The feudal 
lords who had so stupidly destroyed the only gen¬ 
ius which could guide them to victory were one 
by one overthrown by tbe imperial armies; and 


246 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

when the Turk arrived, in the next century, there 
was no solid power in the peninsula which could 
check his baleful progress. 

To recount the vicissitudes of Serbia as princi¬ 
pal battle-ground between Christian Austrian and 
infidel Turk would be a task as tedious as profit¬ 
less. We have seen how the Slavs of the Byzan¬ 
tine Empire failed to become a nation, and this is 
the only point which need concern us. There is 
neither interest nor instruction in the record of 
incessant fighting without definite issue; and to 
the philosophic historian the career of Slavonic 
Turkey becomes almost a blank until the begin¬ 
ning of the present century, when the uprising 
of the Serbs against the Janissaries, under the 
leadership of the eccentric and infamous Kara 
George, reopened the Eastern Question, and per¬ 
haps heralded the rise of a new national life 
among the southern Slavs. 

This sketch of the Danubian peoples has of 
course been but the merest outline. I have not 
attempted, and should indeed feel quite incompe¬ 
tent, to do more than define, by a few salient 
facts, the ethnological relations of these peoples 
and their position in the general history of Eu¬ 
rope. Even so rudimentary an outline as this, 
however, would be incomplete without some allu* 


The Races of the Danube . 247 

sion to the very important part played by the 
Danubian Slavs in the origination of the Protes¬ 
tant revolt against the ecclesiastical supremacy of 
Rome. The circumstances under which the Bul¬ 
garians were converted to Christianity were such 
that during their brief political and literary emi¬ 
nence in the tenth century they became the arch¬ 
heretics of Europe. The Manichaean heresy, sug¬ 
gested by the ancient theology of Persia, in which 
the Devil appears as an independently existing 
Principle of Evil, had always been rife in Arme¬ 
nia ; and it was partly by Armenian missionaries, 
belonging to the Manichaean sect of Paulicians, 
that Bulgaria was converted from heathenism. 
In the middle of the eighth century the Emperor 
Constantine Copronymus transplanted a large col¬ 
ony of Paulicians from Armenia into Thrace, 1 and 
these immigrants were not long in spreading their 
heresy beyond the Balkans. A century later the 
persecuting zeal of the orthodox emperors drove 
Armenia into rebellion, and for a short time an 
independent Paulician state maintained itself on 
the upper Euphrates. Early in the tenth century 
this little state was overthrown, and such a dire- 


1 See the “Historical Sketch of Bosnia,” by Mr. A. J. Evans, pre¬ 
fixed to his excellent work Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on 
Foot. London. 1876. 8vo. 


248 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

ful persecution was inaugurated that the inhabit¬ 
ants in great numbers sought the shelter which 
the Bulgarian Czar Simeon was both able and 
willing to give. “From this period onward,” 
says Mr. Evans, “ the Paulician heresy may be 
said to change its nationality, and to become 
Slavonic.” It also acquired a new name. In 
their Slavonic home these heretics were called 
Bogomiles, from the Bulgarian Bog z ’ milui , or 
“ God have mercy,” in allusion to their peculiar 
devotion to prayer. The sect now became very 
powerful, as the czars, in their struggle for su¬ 
premacy with the Byzantine overlords, could not 
afford to incur the displeasure of such a consider¬ 
able body of their subjects. Bogomilian apostles, 
in keen rivalry with the orthodox missionaries, 
carried their Manichsean doctrines westward all 
over Serbia. After another hundred years the 
catastrophe which had driven this heresy from 
Asia into Europe was curiously repeated in its 
new home. After the power of the Bulgarian 
czars had been finally broken down by Basil II., 
the orthodox emperors began once more to roast 
the obnoxious Paulicians. A fierce persecution 
under Alexius Comnenus set up a current of Bo¬ 
gomilian migration into Serbia, and as these im¬ 
migrants found no favour in the eyes of the ortho- 


The Races of the Danube . 249 

dox Serbian princes, their westward pilgrimage 
was continued into that part of Illyricum now 
known as Bosnia, — a hilly region inhabited, then 
as now, mainly by fair-haired Serbs. From the 
twelfth century onward Bosnia became the head¬ 
quarters of Manichaean heresy, and was a very 
uncomfortable thorn in the flesh of the popes, 
who, with the aid of pious Hungarian kings, kept 
up a perpetual crusade against the stubborn little 
country, without ever achieving any considerable 
success. 

The Papacy had very good grounds for its 
anxiety, for it was from Bosnia that the great 
Albigensian heresy was propagated through north¬ 
ern Italy and southern Gaul. This connection be¬ 
tween eastern and western Protestantism, though 
generally forgotten now, was well understood at 
the time. Matthew Paris states that the Albi- 
gensians possessed a pope of their own, whose 
seat of government was in Bosnia, and who kept 
a vicar residing in Carcassonne. By orthodox 
writers the western heretics were quite frequently 
termed “ Bulgares,” — a designation which became 
invested with the vilest opprobrium, — and a 
glance at the principal Bogomilian doctrines shows 
that the relationship was asserted on valid grounds. 
Like the Manichseans generally, the Bogomiles 


250 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

held that the Devil exists independent of the will 
of the good God, and was the creator of this 
evil world, which it is the work of Christ to re¬ 
deem from his control. They accepted as inspired 
the New Testament, with the Psalms and Proph¬ 
ets, but set little store by the historical books 
of the Old Testament, and rejected the Mpsaic 
writings as dictated by Satan. They denied any 
mystical efficiency to baptism, and laughed at the 
doctrine of transubstantiation, maintaining that 
the consecrated wafer is in no wise different from 
ordinary bread. Some of them are said to have 
neglected baptism altogether. They regarded 
image-worship as no better than heathen idolatry, 
and they paid no respect to the symbol of the 
cross, asking, “ If any man slew the son of a king 
with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood 
be dear to the king ? ” 1 Their aversion to the 
worship of the Virgin was equally pronounced, 
and they despised the intercession of saints. They 
wore long faces, abstained from the use of wine, 
and commended celibacy. Some went so far as to 
refuse animal food, and in general their belief in 
the vileness of matter led them to the extremes 
of asceticism. Their ecclesiastical government 
was in many respects presbyterian; in politics 

1 Evans, op. cit. p. xxx. 


251 


The Races of the Danube. 

they were generally democratic, with a leaning 
toward communism quite in keeping with their 
primitive Slavonic customs as well as with their 
strictly literal interpretation of the New Testa¬ 
ment. 

When we consider that these remarkable sec¬ 
tarians not only set on foot the Albigensian revolt 
which Innocent III. overcame with fire and sword, 
but were also intimately associated with the later 
Slavonic outbreak of which John Huss and Jerome 
of Prague were the leaders, it becomes evident 
that the part played in European history by the 
southern Slavs is far from insignificant. As Mr. 
Evans observes, it is not too much to regard 
Bosnia as the religious Switzerland of mediaeval 
Europe, in whose inaccessible mountain strong¬ 
holds was prolonged the defiant resistance to 
papal supremacy which in the West repeatedly 
succumbed to the overwhelming power of the In¬ 
quisition. The sudden change which followed on 
the invasion of the Turks is instructive as show¬ 
ing the political danger attendant upon excessive 
persecution. As the armies of Muhamad IT. were 
making their way toward Bosnia, King Stephen 
of Hungary began cutting the throats of his 
Bogomile subjects, some forty thousand of whom 
are said to have fled into the Herzeg6vina, while 


252 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

others were sent in chains to be burned at Rome. 
Bosnia was again threatened with an orthodox 
crusade, but the people, preferring to take their 
chances of religious immunity with the Turk, 
threw themselves on him for protection, and sur¬ 
rendered their inexpugnable country to Muhamad 
without striking a blow. The surrender, indeed, 
went further than this; for though the Serbs of 
Bosnia have several times asserted their political 
independence, more than a third of the popula¬ 
tion have become followers of the Prophet, and 
furnish to-day the sole example of a native Eu¬ 
ropean race of Mussulmans. 

December, 1876- 


XIII. 


LIBERAL EDUCATION . 1 

Early in the last century Sir William Temple 
declared that literature is constantly degenerat¬ 
ing, and that the oldest books are always the 
best. Not only is Homer the greatest of poets 
and ACsop the wittiest of fabulists, but Phalaris 
was a letter-writer with whom Pascal and Ma¬ 
dame Sevign6 are not fit to be compared. Thus 
wrote Sir W. Temple, much to his own satisfaction 
and to the edification of many of his contempora¬ 
ries. But lapse of time and changes of circum¬ 
stance bring about signal alterations in the opin¬ 
ions of men. The other day Dr. J. W. Draper — 
in a book entitled “ Civil Policy of America,” and 
made up chiefly of disconnected statements about 
physical geography, Arabian chemists, and Jewish 
physicians — told us that “ the grand depositories 
of human knowledge are not the ancient, but the 
modern, tongues: few, if any, are the facts worth 

1 Essays on a Liberal Education. Edited by Rev. F. W. Farrar, 
M. A., F. R. S. London: Macmillan & Co. 3867. 


254 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

knowing that are to be exclusively obtained by a 
knowledge of Latin and Greek.” And doubtless 
this amusing statement will in some quarters meet 
with as much applause as the loose assertions of 
Temple met with in their time. For this old con¬ 
troversy about the comparative merits of the an¬ 
cients and the moderns has been lately resusci¬ 
tated, though in somewhat altered shape. Times 
have changed ; and what in the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury was considered good meat for strong men 
we should now regard as but indifferent milk for 
babes. We therefore no longer idly argue about 
the comparative amount of genius possessed by an¬ 
cient and by modern writers; but we dispute quite 
zealously, and with sufficient one-sidedness, over 
the comparative value of ancient literature and 
modern science as means of mental discipline and 
branches of liberal education. University reform 
is a favourite subject of discussion. And among 
the multiplicity of things that may be taught un¬ 
der a reformed scheme of education, the problem 
of what'must be taught is pressing ever more 
strongly for a definite solution. The difficulties 
inherent in the problem are greatly enhanced by 
the inevitable prejudices of the inquirers. One 
of the main obstacles in the way of a speedy and 
amicable settlement of the question arises from 


Liberal Education. 


255 


the fact that physical investigators as a class have 
no well-defined idea of the benefits to be derived 
from classical studies, while classical scholars and 
literary men are too generally ignorant of the 
value of physical science as a means of training 
the intellect. Our opinions reflect our experience 
with tolerable accuracy, and we can hardly be ex¬ 
pected to have a very lively sense of the worth of 
pursuits in which we have never heartily engaged. 
If we have always smoked meerschaum we are 
apt to think poorly of briarwood. So when a lit¬ 
erary man takes up a treatise on “ Determinants ” 
with the casual remark that he hates the sight of 
such a book, we may be pretty sure that, what¬ 
ever else his opinions may be good for, he is no 
very competent judge of the educational value of 
mathematics. It is quite obvious that he dislikes 
the subject as some women dislike politics, be¬ 
cause he has never mastered the rudiments of it. 
To him a parabola is only a neat-looking curve, 
as to the average classical scholar a Leyden jar is 
only a glass bottle with a rod stuck through the 
cork, and to many a student of physics the Iliad 
is nothing but a tiresome account of the squabbles 
of a parcel of barbarians, “ proving nothing,” as 
worthy Mr. Vince would have said. 

So deep-seated at present is the incapacity of 


256 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

our “ ancients ” and “ moderns ” to understand 
each other, that when a man of catholic culture, 
like Mr. Mill, presents both sides of the case with 
equal force we find either party disposed to rely 
upon one half of his argument, while ignoring or 
disparaging the other half. Dr. Youmans, for 
example, in the Introduction to his valuable col¬ 
lection of essays on “ Modern Culture,” having 
quoted Mr. Mill’s address in behalf of scientific 
studies, thinks it but fair to add that the same 
discourse contains a vigorous argument for the 
classics. “ But while,” says Dr. Youmans, “ Mr. 
Mill urges the importance of scientific studies for 
all , an examination of his argument for the clas¬ 
sics will show that it is applicable only to those 
who, like himself, are professional scholars, and 
devote their lives to philological, historical, or 
critical studies.” Now, possibly Mr. Mill ought 
to have limited his argument in this way; but he 
certainly has not done so. He makes no such 
distinction : nowhere does he even faintly inti¬ 
mate that he is not putting one class of studies 
upon the same footing as the other. His whole 
magnificent Discourse is devoted to showing the 
urgent necessity which exists for a well-planned 
scheme of education in which both kinds of learn¬ 
ing shall be recognized. He believes that there is 


Liberal Education . 


257 


no reason, except the stupidity of instructors, why 
classics and the sciences should not both be 
taught; and he holds that our earnest recognition 
of the claims of the one should never blind us to 
the claims of the other. 

In view of this, it is pleasant to meet with a 
book, written chiefly by classical scholars who 
have taken university honours, in which the just 
claims of physical science and the shortcomings 
of a merely literary education are adequately rec¬ 
ognized. The writers of the nine essays forming 
the volume now under consideration are all grad¬ 
uates of Cambridge, and all but one have at one 
time or another obtained fellowships in that uni¬ 
versity. Most of them, therefore, may be pre¬ 
sumed to be moderately acquainted with ancient 
literature, and to some extent sensible of the ad¬ 
vantages attending the study of it. The editor, 
Mr. Farrar, has devoted a large part of his time 
to philological studies, and has written a treatise 
on Greek syntax, besides two volumes on the ori¬ 
gin and development of language, all of which 
are works of considerable philosophical merit, 
though not perhaps of the highest and most ac¬ 
curate scholarship. Of the other writers, two at 
least — Professor Seeley and Lord Houghton — 


258 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

are well known as men of wide literary culture 
and trained judgment. 

The opinions of such men upon the subject of 
classical education are entitled to respectful con¬ 
sideration ; and when we find among them the 
most complete unanimity in the declaration that 
a large part of the classical instruction now given 
in English universities is utterly worthless, and 
ought to be replaced by a course in physical sci¬ 
ence, we cannot set aside the judgment on the 
plea of ignorant prejudice. Let not Philistinism 
clap its hands too hastily, however; for the ob¬ 
ject of this Cambridge book is, not to supersede, 
but to complement, classical studies. It declares, 
not against the study of antiquity ( Alterthums - 
wissenschaft ), but against the pedantry with which 
that study is now carried on; and one of the 
ablest essays in the volume is devoted to showing 
that physical science is habitually taught with 
quite as much pedantry as any branch of ancient 
learning. 

The long career of irrational stultification, 
through defect in the method of instruction, is 
usually begun in our school-days. Most countries 
have rivers running through them ; and in study¬ 
ing elementary geography, we are expected duly 
to learn their courses. Many countries are inter- 


Liberal Education . 


259 


sected, or are parted from their neighbours, by 
chains of mountains; and this second class of 
facts we are likewise called upon to master. But 
we are not told that the two sets of phenomena 
are inseparably related. We are not told that, 
since all rivers must run down hill, therefore their 
positions and courses must depend upon the posi¬ 
tion of mountains, so that by knowing the latter 
we may be helped to the knowledge of the former. 
We are required to learn these facts as they stand 
in the elementary text-books, in “godlike isola¬ 
tion.” We are compelled to take in a host of de¬ 
tails by a sheer effort of unintelligent memory, 
while the process of association, by appealing to 
which alone is memory made serviceable, is ap¬ 
pealed to as little as possible. So in grammar, 
when by dint of irksome mechanical repetition 
we have become able to state that “ a verb must 
agree with its nominative case in number and 
person,” we have learned a bare fact, which, apart 
from its explanation, is a useless fact; and that it 
has or admits of any explanation we are rarely 
led to suspect. 

In approaching foreign languages we become 
immersed still deeper in the mire of elementary 
unintelligibility. We commit to memory scores 
of intricate paradigms, containing all possible 


260 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

forms of the noun or verb, before we have been 
introduced to a single sentence in which these 
forms are presented. In mute dismay we con¬ 
template ingeniously framed rules of syntax, be¬ 
fore we have been shown a glimpse of the facts 
upon which these rules depend. We get the gen¬ 
eralization before the particulars, the abstract be¬ 
fore the concrete ; we learn to repeat formulas 
before we have the notions needful for filling 
them. As a natural result, our Latin and Greek 
seem very difficult. To enhance our perplex¬ 
ity, the same thing is generally introduced to us 
under different names, or, quite as often, differ¬ 
ent things under the same name. We are told 
that the genitive in Greek denotes possession, and 
next that it likewise denotes origin, and again 
that it denotes separation. We are informed that 
the Latin genitive, primarily denoting possession, 
may, however, if of the first or second declension 
and singular number, be used to signify place, an 
idea conveyed by the ablative also, which for the 
time being kindly neglects its proper function of 
expressing removal. The genitive, moreover, may 
express one kind of resemblance, another kind 
being, by a mysterious dispensation of Providence, 
indicated by the dative. Even if all these cum¬ 
brous rules for learning ancient languages were 


Liberal Education . 


261 


correct, instead of being many of them inaccurate, 
and nearly all of them antiquated, they would 
still be worse than useless to the young student. 
Thrust into his mind as they are, before he has 
had concrete examples of them, they are utterly 
meaningless. He knows not how or where to ap¬ 
ply them. They serve only to confuse and dis¬ 
courage him. Nor are matters mended much 
when we begin to do what we should all along 
have been doing, — when we begin to read. We 
read a few sentences each day, parsing as we go 
along, according to the inexplicable rules just re¬ 
ferred to, and paying little or no attention to the 
meaning of our author. Seldom do we read a 
sufficient mass of matter consecutively to have 
the language take any hold upon us. Thus we 
read Aristophanes, and hardly suspect his con¬ 
summate and irresistible humour. We read De¬ 
mosthenes, and remain ignorant of Athenian poli¬ 
tics. And a few years after leaving college we 
are able, by dint of much thumbing of the dic¬ 
tionary, and with occasional reference to the 
grammar, to pick out the meaning of Latin and 
Greek sentences. This is too often the sorry re¬ 
sult which is dignified by the name of a classical 
education. 

Yet perhaps our scientific education, as at pres- 


262 Darwinism and Other Essays* 

ent carried on by means of text-books, is not 
much better. We take up a book on physics, and 
are told that the Newtonian theory is still one of 
the great rival theories of light, although it was 
utterly overthrown at the beginning of the pres¬ 
ent century. We take up a book on astronomy, 
and are told that the earth is 95,000,000 miles 
distant from the sun, although the researches of 
M. Foucault have shown that the distance is only 
91,000,000. We take up a book on physiology, 
and read about “ a vital principle which suspends 
natural laws,” although every competent physiol¬ 
ogist well knows that any such “ principle ” is as 
much a distorted figment of the fancy as the basi¬ 
lisks which in old times were supposed to haunt 
secluded cellars. We hear grave lectures on psy¬ 
chology, in which the systems of Locke or Kant 
are laboriously expounded, while of the recent in¬ 
novations made by writers like Bain and Mauds- 
ley we get not the slightest hint. So in history 
and philology we are too often taught as if Momm¬ 
sen and Grote had never written. Grimm’s 
magnificent researches, throwing light upon the 
whole structure of language, and presenting the 
history of human thought under an entirely new 
aspect, are non-existent to the mind of the stu¬ 
dent. He pursues the even tenour of his way in 


Liberal Education. 263 

blissful ignorance of Sir G. C. Lewis, and sees 
no absurdity in the mythological theories of Eu- 
hemeros. 

Now it seems to us that the reform which is 
most urgently needed in our system of liberal 
education consists not in the substitution of one 
branch of studies for another so much as in the 
more liberal, rational, and intelligent pursuit of 
various branches. In the main, fairness of mind, 
accuracy of judgment, and shrewdness of per¬ 
ception are to be secured as much by one kind of 
research as by another kind. The alleged nar¬ 
rowness and torpidity — the “ Kronian ” charac¬ 
teristics (to use an Aristophanic word) — of 
classical scholars are due far more to the irra¬ 
tional method in which they have pursued their 
studies than to those studies themselves. Let the 
student really fathom who Julius Csesar was, 
what he thought, what he did, wherein he differed 
from Cato or Pompey, why his policy succeeded, 
and what its effects have been upon all subse¬ 
quent generations down to our time, — let him 
duly fathom all this, and he will have gone far 
toward getting as good a political education as a 
man needs to have. Let him, again, justly esti¬ 
mate the value of ancient chronology ; let him 
once have critically examined the works of Bun. 


264 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

sen and Lepsius until he has fairly detected their 
weak points, and he will be as little likely to sur¬ 
render himself to any current delusion as the man 
who has studied astronomy or chemistry. The 
real difficulty is that our scheme of classical edu¬ 
cation does not provide for any adequate knowl¬ 
edge, even of classical subjects. Its energies are 
entirely devoted, during eight or ten years, to the 
imperfect acquirement of two languages which 
ought to be very well learned in four or five; 
and then no time is left for anything else. 

Our system of classical education has come 
down to us from the close of the Middle Ages, — 
from a time when nearly all that was valuable in 
literature was to be found in the writings of an¬ 
cient authors. Until toward their close, the Mid¬ 
dle Ages had accomplished little in literature 
worthy to be compared with the great works of 
Greek and Roman antiquity. And when, in the 
fifteenth century, the expulsion of Greeks from 
Constantinople and the invention of printing 
brought about the rapid dissemination of ancient 
literature among people at last socially prepared 
to welcome it, the effect was as if a new continent 
had been opened to view in the mental world as 
vast and inviting as that discovered by Columbus 
beyond the Atlantic. The exploration of the one 


Liberal Education. 


265 


was carried on as keenly as that of the other. 
For a long time there could be no better or more 
profitable study than that of ancient literature. 
Before a new career of progress could be inaugu¬ 
rated, old forgotten acquisitions must be recovered 
and earnestly studied in the light of new political, 
social, and intellectual circumstances. Accord¬ 
ingly, in those days there were classical scholars 
of gigantic calibre. From the fifteenth to the 
seventeenth century we have the names of Eras¬ 
mus, Budseus, the Scaligers, Grotius, Reuchlin, 
Salmasius, Casaubon, Lipsius, Selden, Bentley, and 
Huet, representatives of a mighty and astonishing 
style of scholarship, which doubtless, from the 
absence of the proper social conditions, will never 
be seen again. Philosophers, like Bacon, Des- 
. cartes, and Leibnitz, bent upon mastering the sum 
of human knowledge, could do no better than to 
read with critical eyes the writings of Plato and 
Aristotle. In light literature, as represented by 
Rabelais, Montaigne, Ben Jonson, and Burton, 
classical learning was equally conspicuous. And 
in social intercourse Latin, and to some extent 
Greek, held the place since usurped by French 
and other modern tongues. While modern lan¬ 
guages were but little studied, the common dia¬ 
lect of educated Europeans was formed by the 


266 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

tongues of antiquity. These languages were 
therefore learned to be written and spoken, not to 
be dozed oyer, dabbled in, and forgotten. They 
were learned in the natural way, by concrete 
examples, and by assiduous practice, not out of 
grammars bristling with inexplicable abstrac¬ 
tions. Homer and Virgil were read for their lit¬ 
erary interest, not as the text for monotonous 
parsing-lessons and useless disquisitions on syl¬ 
labic quantity. 

The changes which classical education has since 
undergone are narrated by Mr. Parker in the first 
essay contained in the volume before us. We 
have not space to rehearse the interesting details 
which are there given, but must call attention to 
the striking remarks of Mr. Farrar and Professor 
Seeley upon the method of teaching the classics 
now prevalent in the English universities. Mr. 
Farrar’s essay is devoted to exposing the worth¬ 
lessness of Greek and Latin verse-making as a 
means of culture. If there be in our day, says 
Mr. Farrar, any kind of achievement which is at 
once impossible to do and useless when done, it is 
the writing of good Latin or Greek verses. Our 
American universities, so far as we know, do not 
require it to be done. Once in a while they en¬ 
courage students to attempt these nugce difficiles, 


Liberal Education. 


267 


in the hope of obtaining prizes or a college reputa¬ 
tion, in case of success. But in our best colleges 
any student can graduate, and most do gradu¬ 
ate, without ever having written Latin or Greek 
except in more or less halting prose. In Eng¬ 
land, however, there lingers in many quarters a 
queer superstition, that the chief end of clas¬ 
sical education is to enable its votaries to beguile 
their leisure hours by stringing together hexa¬ 
meters. As the result of this system, we have 
some pretty poems in the “ Arundines Cami,” 
Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s “Prolusiones HomericaB,” 
Lord Lyttelton’s “ Samson Agonistes,” and many 
hundred reams of detestable trash, written in a 
dialect such as Aristophanes would hardly have 
thought fit for the silliest geese and cockatoos of 
his Cloudcuckooville. In the time now wasted 
in verse composition in each college career, the 
methods and leading results of several physical 
sciences might easily be learned. This is the 
kind of “ instruction ” which our essayists would 
be glad to see done away with. They hold that 
the chief end of classical education is, beside af¬ 
fording scope for the exercise of sagacity in rea¬ 
soning, to enlarge our minds by making us ac¬ 
quainted with the ideas, feelings, and customs of 
a time when men thought, felt, and acted very 


268 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

differently from now. The man who thoroughly 
knows Alterthumswissenschaft , or the science of 
Greek and Roman antiquity, differs from the man 
who does not, in much the same way that the man 
who has travelled all over the world with his eyes 
open differs from the man whose knowledge of 
the world is limited to what is going on in his 
own village. But how a knowledge of ancient 
civilization is to be got by vain attempts to imi¬ 
tate the diction of Ovid or Theokritos it would be 
difficult to say. The proposal to study the life of 
modern Germany, to get an accurate idea of its 
political and social condition, its literature, its do¬ 
mestic habits, its contributions to human improve¬ 
ment, and the predominant sentiments which ac¬ 
tuate its people, by writing quatrains in imitation 
of the hymns in “ Faust,” would be saluted with 
peals of inextinguishable laughter. Yet it would 
be about as sensible as the method of studying 
antiquity adopted by the verse-makers. 

The subject of verse-making, as we have said, 
does not concern us so intimately as our brethren 
across the water, England being alone among civ¬ 
ilized nations in the importance which she at¬ 
taches to this pursuit. But though our schools 
and colleges do not require the writing of verses, 
they often waste a great deal of time and energy 


Liberal Education. 


269 


in teaching the rules of prosody, as well as by the 
cumbrous and inefficient method in which they 
conduct classical instruction in general, and par¬ 
ticularly by their habit of beginning at the wrong 
end. We learn French and German with ease, 
because we begin with concrete examples. In 
studying Latin and Greek, on the other hand, we 
begin with abstract rules, and are not seldom com¬ 
pelled to memorize what we cannot understand. 
Hence the difficulties under which we labour are 
so great that, by the time they are conquered, 
we have too often neither leisure nor interest left 
for other studies. By this process the mind is in 
many cases stupefied rather than quickened; and 
the system, far from producing liberally educated 
men, fails even to produce good classical scholars. 
We believe that the only efficient way to learn 
foreign languages, ancient or modern, is to learn 
them as we learn our own in childhood. We can¬ 
not indeed have Greek and Roman nurses, but 
we can at least have the living phenomena of 
language presented to our minds, instead of the 
dead formulas of grammar. If this natural method 
were to be duly inaugurated, we believe that 
Greek and Latin might be thoroughly learned in 
one third of the time now spent in learning them 
superficially. We should again have excellent 


270 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Hellenists and Latinists, — not, perhaps, scholars 
like Erasmus and Scaliger, for we no longer need 
the same sort of work that was needed once, and 
Donaldson’s notion that learned works should still 
be written in Latin may safely be pronounced a 
chimera; but we should have men among us 
capable of reading ancient literature with ease 
and pleasure, — men capable of extracting from it 
an amount of historical and philosophical knowl¬ 
edge to which the great scholars of the Renais¬ 
sance were utter strangers. The scholarship of 
the present day is necessarily of a quite different 
type from that of three centuries ago. It has 
been reacted upon by physical, political, and his¬ 
torical science. Its ideal consists in the thorough 
knowledge of ancient life, manners, moral ideas, 
and superstitions, as an essential part of the whole 
history of mankind. Its representatives are men 
like Grote, Littre, and Mommsen. Properly pur¬ 
sued, it enlarges our sympathies, shows us the 
people of bygone times as men like ourselves, 
alike yet different, actuated by like passions, but 
guided by different opinions and different con¬ 
ceptions. It forbids us to judge of them by the 
standard of our own age; it corrects the preju¬ 
dices inseparable from ignorance of history; it 
gives us lessons in political conduct; it makes us 


Liberal Education . 


271 


cosmopolitan and hospitable in mind. These are 
reasons why classical learning should not be given 
up. They are reasons why it will never be given 
up, but will be rationalized in its method and ex¬ 
tended in its province. 

To illustrate more fully what is meant by say 
ing that the proper way to teach is to begin with 
the concrete, we shall take the case of one of the 
natural sciences as it has been skilfully treated 
by Mr. Wilson, in his contribution to the present 
volume. His . essay shows that science is often 
quite as cumbrously taught as the classics; but it 
also shows how it ought to be taught. 

Botany and experimental physics, according to 
Mr. Wilson, are of all branches of science the most 
interesting and the most intellectually profitable 
to children. Let us suppose, then, that we have 
a class of moderately intelligent children to start in 
botany : how shall we begin the subject in order 
that it may be made at once interesting and intel¬ 
lectually profitable ? Text-books will not help us 
much. For instance, Dr. Gray’s excellent little 
book, “ How Plants Grow,” begins as follows : — 

Plants are chiefly made up of three parts, namely, 
of root, stem , and leaves. These are called the plant’s 
organs; that is, its instruments. And as these parts 
are all that any plant needs for its growth, or vegeta¬ 
tion, they are called the organs of vegetation. 


272 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

Plants also produce jiowers , from which comes the 
fruit , and from this the seed. These take no part in 
nourishing the plant. Their use is to enable it to give 
rise to new individuals, which increase the numbers of 
that kind of plant; to take the place of the parent in due 
time, and keep up the stock, — that is, to reproduce and 
perpetuate the species. So the flower, with its parts, 
the fruit and the seed, are called the plant’s organs of 
REPRODUCTION. 

Now this is very pleasant reading for grown 
people, who know something about the subject, 
are slightly familiar with the conceptions of nu¬ 
trition, heredity, and genesis, and have learned, 
however rudely, to classify their notions. But 
for boys and girls who begin botany at the age 
when it ought to be begun, this would be neither 
pleasant nor profitable. If set to learn the above 
passage by rote, in the ordinary way, they would 
be likely to find it irksome, and would certainly 
fail to gain accurate ideas corresponding to all the 
expressions employed in it. And, above all, those 
who learned their lesson would have taken the 
first step towards acquiring the pernicious habit 
of accepting statements upon authority. If ques¬ 
tioned concerning their grounds for believing that 
the organs of vegetation in a plant are its root, 
stem, and leaves, they would perforce reply that 


Liberal Education . 


273 


they believed it because it was so written in the 
book. Here is the fatal vice of our common 
methods of education. They appeal to faith, and 
not to reason. It is supposed that children are 
properly instructed if they are told that certain 
things are so and so, and understand what is told 
them sufficiently to repeat the words of it. Noth¬ 
ing can be more erroneous. No mental discipline, 
worthy of the name, can be secured in this way. 
We are benefited, not by the truths which we 
passively accept, but by those which we actively 
find out. It makes little difference whether a 
child is told that “ a plant consists of root, stem, 
and leaves,” or that “ a verb must agree with its 
nominative case in number and person.” The 
former proposition is the more intelligible; but in 
either case the child is taught to accept on author¬ 
ity a generalization which he should be taught to 
make for himself from a due comparison of in¬ 
stances. With the traditional let us now contrast 
the rational method of studying botany. We 
cannot possibly do this better than in Mr. Wil¬ 
son’s own words: — 

Suppose, then, your class of thirty or forty boys 
before you, as they sit at their first botanical lesson : 
some curious to know what is going to happen, some re¬ 
signed to anything, some convinced that it is all a folly. 

18 


274 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

You hand round to each boy several specimens, say of 
the herb Robert; and taking one of the flowers, you 
ask one of them to describe the parts of it. ‘ Some 
pink leaves,’ is the reply. ‘ How many ? ’ * Five.’ 

‘Any other parts?’ ‘Some little things inside.’ ‘Any¬ 
thing outside?’ ‘Some green leaves.’ ‘How many?’ 
‘Five.’ ‘Very good. Now pull off the five green leaves 
outside, and lay them side by side ; next pull off the five 
pink leaves, and lay them side by side; and now ex¬ 
amine the little things inside: what do you find?’ 
6 A lot of little stalks or things.’ ‘ Pull them off, and 
count them.’ They find ten. Then show them the 
little dust-bags at the top, and finally the curiously con¬ 
structed central column and the carefully concealed 
seeds. By this time, all are on the alert. Then we re¬ 
sume: The parts in that flower are, outer green envel¬ 
ope, inner coloured envelope, the little stalks with dust¬ 
bags, and the central column with the seeds. Then you 
give them all wall-flowers; and they are to write down 
what they find. By the end of the hour they have 
learned one great lesson, — the existence of the four 
floral whorls, though they have not yet heard the 
name. 

Here, let it be noted, the students are making 
their own way. They are not told that a flower 
consists of four whorls, but they find it out for 
themselves, and know it henceforth on the evi¬ 
dence of their own senses. If they were to see or 


Liberal Education . 275 

hear the fact disputed, they would be incredu¬ 
lous ; they would no longer bow to authority. In 
the next place, they are gaining ideas before they 
are dosed with words. They are not wasting 
their energies in conning half-understood formu¬ 
las about sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils; but 
they take note of the green leaves, the pink leaves, 
the stems with dust-bags, and the column with 
seeds in it; and by and by they find it conven¬ 
ient to describe these things by one word for 
each, thus avoiding circumlocution and waste of 
breath. In this way the terms calyx, corolla , etc., 
come to have a definite meaning; and are in no 
danger of being used emptily, without reference 
to the ideas which they ought to convey. The 
besetting sin of human reasoning is the employ¬ 
ment of words without regard to their full con¬ 
notation and exact meaning; and for this our 
systems of early education are in part responsible. 
It should be recognized as an inflexible rule that 
the student is not to be taught to use a word until 
he feels the need of it in order to express his ideas 
more readily. 

Next, Mr. Wilson would let his pupils guess 
about the uses of the parts of the flower, — what 
the green leaves are for, what the central column 
is for, what the dust-bags are for ; and would tell 


276 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

them just enough to help them to hit upon the 
answer. Then he would give them an unsymmet- 
rical flower, like the pelargonium or the garden 
geranium, which, on picking to pieces, they would 
discover to be formed on the same general plan. 
Then would come the daisy and dandelion, where 
the outer green envelope and the little dust-bags 
are not so easy to find. Then he would call at¬ 
tention to the spiral arrangement of leaves; the 
overlapping of sepals in the rose; and the alter- 
nance of parts ; and from this to Goethe’s mag¬ 
nificent generalizations there would be but a step, 
and that a step easy to be taken. 

Taught in this way, whatever flower a boy sees, 
after a few lessons, he looks at with interest, as modi¬ 
fying the view of flowers he has attained to. He is 
tempted by his discoveries: he is on the verge of the 
unknown, and perpetually transferring to the known. 
All that he sees finds a place in his theories, and in turn 
reacts upon them, for his theories are growing. He is 
fairly committed to the struggle in the vast field of ob¬ 
servation, and he learns that the test of a theory is its 
power of including facts. He learns that he must use 
his eyes and his reason, and that then he is equipped 
with all that is necessary for discovering truth. He 
learns that he is capable of judging of other people’s 
views, and of forming an opinion of his own. He learns 


Liberal Education . 


277 


that nothing in the plant, however minute, is unimpor¬ 
tant ; that he owes only temporary allegiance to the doc¬ 
trines of his master, and not a perpetual faith. 

Only contrast this with the common practice of 
loading a boy’s memory with cellules and paren- 
chyma , protoplasm and chlorophyll , rhizomes and 
bulbs , endosmose and exosmose , before he has any 
definite and abiding conception of how a plant is 
put together! 

Mr. Wilson’s method carries with it its own 
recommendation ; and his method of teaching bot¬ 
any is the method upon which all teaching, if it is 
to discipline the intelligence, should be conducted. 
First the facts, then the generalization, lastly the 
nomenclature. All the knowledge which in the 
conduct of life we are able to use to any good 
purpose is necessarily acquired in this way. If 
we had no knowledge of human nature save what 
might be gained by the memorizing of abstract 
ethical formulas, we should never acquire the 
knack of dealing sensibly with our fellow-crea¬ 
tures. But we notice how men act under given 
circumstances ; day by day, and year by year, we 
gather and collate such facts of observation into 
general opinions, crude indeed as compared with 
the exhaustive generalizations of physical science, 
yet as far as they go embodying the results of 


278 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

genuine experience. Thus our knowledge of men 
gradually acquires the accuracy and precision 
needful, in order that we may act upon it se¬ 
curely. In gathering such knowledge, — in learn¬ 
ing how to live rightly, — our early education 
ought to help us. Reasoning is reasoning, and 
its canons are substantially the same, whether 
flowers, or triangles, or participles, or human na¬ 
ture constitute the matter reasoned about. By 
reasoning out what we know, we make knowledge 
lead to wisdom ; we become civilized as we grow 
older. If the vast body of truths constituting 
modern science could have been miraculously told 
to our mediaeval ancestors, an imposing quantity 
of pretentious scholarship might have been called 
into existence, but the world would not have 
become civilized much the sooner. It is the con¬ 
scious effort put forth in making all these dis¬ 
coveries which has worked the profound modifi¬ 
cation of mind and character called civilization. 
Humanity could not, after toilfully elaborating 
the laws of gravitation and chemical affinity, re¬ 
main as barbarous and untutored as before. This 
was in part what Lessing had in his mind, when 
he said that if God were to hold in his right hand 
perfect truth, and in his left hand the untiring 
search for truth, he would unhesitatingly choose 


Liberal Education. 


279 


the latter. It is upon discovery, not upon rote¬ 
learning, that humanity has thrived. And if—■ 
to adopt another idea of that incomparable man 
— civilization is but the education of the race, it 
is after the course of civilization that a rational 
course of education should in miniature be pat¬ 
terned. 

To Professor Seeley’s excellent essay on Com¬ 
petitive Tests we can only briefly allude. The 
state of things at Cambridge which it describes is 
exceedingly instructive. At Cambridge, if any¬ 
where in the world, the system of competition has 
been put to a crucial test. The examinations are 
formidable, alike from their severity and from 
their rigid accuracy. Immense rewards await the 
successful scholar, and all possible means for ob¬ 
taining a creditable position are placed at the dis¬ 
posal of the ambitious student. Yet the results 
thus far obtained from the competitive system 
are by no means brilliant. It does not apparently 
increase the number of eminent scholars, or even 
of thoroughly educated men, produced by the 
university. The complaint is even made that 
England has ceased to produce great scholars, 
that in point of erudition she is falling behind 
the Continental nations; and it is frequently re¬ 
marked as a significant fact that the most learned 


280 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

of Englishmen in the present age — men like Mill 
and Huxley, Garnett and Grote — have not been 
educated at the universities. But this accusation 
is exaggerated and somewhat irrelevant; for the 
competitive system is a very modern institution, 
and the great scholars just mentioned are in no 
way the contemporaries of those brought up un¬ 
der it. Yet, if we are to reason in this way, it 
must be said that England has no cause to be 
ashamed of the array of illustrious scholars which 
she has to show for the nineteenth century. And 
most of them have been university men who have 
graduated either with high honours, or at least 
with credit. 

It is not so much, however, by the number of 
great scholars which it turns out, as by the gen¬ 
eral standard of intelligence among its graduates, 
that the system of a university is to be judged. 
A man who lives to edit Lucretius or Aristotle, 
as Mr. Munro and Sir A. Grant have done, will 
most likely in his college days study for the sake 
of study, and the competitive or any other system 
can exert but a transient effect upon him. The 
English universities afford great facilities to a 
young man who desires to study in earnest, and 
is already a scholar in embryo. But the question 
which here especially concerns us is, What is the 


Liberal Education. 


281 


worth of the competitive system now in use as a 
wholesome incentive to the average young man 
who does not passionately love knowledge for its 
own sake? Does it tend to widen and render 
more thorough the education which he will get at 
the university ? Experience is beginning to tell 
us plainly that the reverse is the case. The edu¬ 
cation of young men in the English universities 
is narrowed and rendered more superficial by the 
competitive system. Whatever results may be 
brought forth by comparing the lists of great 
scholars which England and the Continental na¬ 
tions can respectively furnish, there can be no 
doubt that the average college graduate in France 
or Germany attains to a far higher degree of 
knowledge and culture than the average graduate 
of Oxford or Cambridge. He does not ordinarily 
manifest that preternatural ignorance of every¬ 
thing except the classics which characterizes the 
English student. And his study of the classics 
has usually enriched him with a more or less val¬ 
uable stock of literary, critical, and philosophical 
ideas, which the Englishman, absorbed in verse- 
writing and prize-getting, has never caught sight 
of. He knows a greater number of authors, and 
he knows them to more profit. Now for this su¬ 
perficiality and narrowness of English education 


282 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

the competitive system is directly responsible. It 
transforms the means into the end. It makes the 
student think more of winning the prize than of 
mastering the subject in hand according to his 
own intellectual needs. And that there is all the 
difference in the world between mastering a sub¬ 
ject and making a brilliant show with it at an 
examination every scholar well knows. Professor 
Seeley has graphically described the results of 
the system at Cambridge. The object of the tri¬ 
pos examinations being to distinguish accurately 
the merit of the students, it follows that those sub¬ 
jects in which attainments can be tested with pre¬ 
cision take precedence of subjects in which they 
cannot. These latter subjects, 44 however impor¬ 
tant they may be, gradually cease to be valued, or 
taught, or learned, while the former come into re¬ 
pute, and acquire an artificial value. This cannot 
take place without an extraordinary perversion of 
views both in the taught and the teachers. They 
learn to weigh the sciences in a perfectly new 
scale, and one which gives perfectly new results. 
They reject as worthless for educational purposes 
the greatest questions which can occupy the hu¬ 
man mind, and attach unbounded importance to 
some of the least.” Philosophy, for instance, is 
rejected, while the useless details of grammar and 


Liberal Education . 


283 


prosody are made much of. On the one hand, 
young men may graduate with signal honour, and 
yet never know what great principles were at 
stake in the Peloponnesian War; while, on the 
other hand, these same young men are taught to 
be “ashamed of falling short of perfect knowl¬ 
edge in the genders of Latin nouns, which involve 
no principles at all, and in which a minute ac¬ 
curacy can hardly be attained without a certain 
frivolity or eccentricity of memory ! ” 

Still worse, the competitive system vulgarizes 
the mind of the student. Scholarly enthusiasm, 
an exalted opinion of the value of knowledge, 
faith in culture as such, — “ divine curiosity,” in a 
word, — should be the student’s incentives to la¬ 
bour. These are the only motives which can ever 
lead to any culture worthy of the name. The 
competitive system tends to destroy these mo¬ 
tives, replacing them by the vulgar desire to out¬ 
shine one’s companions. 

Instead of enlarging the range of the student’s an¬ 
ticipations, it narrows them. It makes him careless of 
his future life, regardless of his higher interests, and 
concentrates all his thoughts upon the paltry examina¬ 
tion upon which perhaps a fellowship depends, or suc¬ 
cess in some profession is supposed to depend. It is 
well known that any one who asks himself the question, 


284 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

‘Is this course of study good for me ? does it favour my 
real progress, my ultimate success?’ is not fit for the 
tripos. Thinking of any kind is regarded as dangerous. 
It is the well-known saying of a Cambridge private tu¬ 
tor : ‘ If So-and-so did not think so much, he might dc 
very well.’ I may content myself with remarking that 
the particular student who did think too much, and who, 
perhaps as a consequence, was beaten in the tripos, now 
stands in scientific reputation above all his contempo¬ 
raries. 

An adequate examination of Professor Seeley’s 
arguments, and especially of the practical expedi¬ 
ents by which he would do away with the evils 
just mentioned, would carry us far beyond our 
limits. The volume before us is not one which 
can easily be epitomized and furnished with a 
running commentary. So many suggestions are 
made and questions opened in it that any at¬ 
tempt to treat it thus thoroughly would end in 
the production of a companion volume rather than 
a brief article. But from what has been said it 
will be seen that our essayists do not belong to 
the number of those who disparage classical stud¬ 
ies as unfit for the needs of our time. The Phi¬ 
listinism which regards everything as useless that 
is not utilitarian need seek for no encouragement 
in this book. The claims of physical science are 


Liberal Education . 


285 


urged from considerations of general culture, and 
not of narrow utility. And for this we heartily 
commend the writers. There is no reason what¬ 
ever why Philistinism should be allowed the ex¬ 
clusive protectorship of physical science. To as¬ 
sail or defend the study of it, while taking into 
account only its utilitarian aspects, is wholly to 
ignore the true state of the question. It is to 
commit a mistake like that committed by Ma¬ 
caulay in his eloquent but superficial essay on 
Bacon. The study of science, properly conducted, 
is by no means subservient to objects of narrow 
utility. The utilitarian point of view, in the lim¬ 
ited sense of the word, is not at all apparent in 
Laplace’s explanation of the perturbed motions of 
the planets, in Gerhardt’s theory of atomicity, in 
Cuvier’s classification of animals, or in Darwin’s 
investigations into the principles of variation. 
Indeed, that profound but somewhat chimerical 
writer, Auguste Comte, expressly finds fault with 
contemporary followers of science because they 
do not sufficiently confine themselves to investi¬ 
gations which have a perceptible bearing upon 
the interests of society. In his pontifical fashion, 
he authoritatively warns us against pursuing such 
useless inquiries as those which concern stellar 
astronomy, the cellular structure of organic be- 


286 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

ings, the origin of species, etc. But we have no 
fear that the investigating world will take heed 
of his misapplied caution. That inborn curiosity 
which, according to the Semitic myth, has al¬ 
ready made us “ like gods, knowing good and 
evil,” will continue to inspire us until the last 
secret of nature is laid bare ; and doubtless in the 
untiring search we shall uncover many priceless 
jewels in places where we least expect to find 
them. The legitimate claim which science makes 
is that, while drawing the mind toward investi¬ 
gation and activity for its own sake, it confers 
upon humanity unlooked-for rewards. 

But in order that either a literary or a scien¬ 
tific education shall produce worthy results, it 
must be rationally conducted, with a single eye to 
the greatest possible perfection of culture. Noth¬ 
ing will be gained by giving up Greek composi¬ 
tion, and studying botany or chemistry as a mere 
collection of “ useful ” details. The adversaries 
of a classical and literary culture will do well to 
bear this in mind. It is not by throwing over¬ 
board a valuable portion of the cargo, but by 
adopting improved methods of navigating the 
ship, that we shall make a successful voyage. 


June, 1868 . 


XIV. 


TJiTCVERSITY REFORM. 

It seems to be quite generally felt that the 
present time is a favourable one for entertaining 
and discussing various projects for the improve¬ 
ment of the University at Cambridge. To the 
question of reform, in its general outlines, the at¬ 
tention of our readers has already been directed 
by able hands. 1 It is here proposed to pursue 
the subject more into detail, and to deduce from 
a few general principles the rudiments of a sys¬ 
tematic scheme of reform. 

Note, first, that the idea of reform is to be kept 
distinctly separate from that of revolution, and 
that, while advocating the former, all encourage¬ 
ment to the latter will here be strictly withheld. 
The improvements from time to time aimed at 
should as far as possible be brought about with¬ 
out effacing the distinctive characteristics of the 

1 See F. H. Hedge’s article in the Atlantic Monthly , September, 
1866. The important change in the constitution of the university, by 
which the Board of Overseers became an elected body, had just been 
effected. 


288 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

original system. We are unable to sympathize 
with the radical spirit which would make a bom 
fire of all churches because the Pentateuch does 
not teach geology, or which would upset an in¬ 
digenous and time-honoured government because 
certain social evils co-exist with it. And we can¬ 
not but think that an attempt to revolutionize our 
university, by assimilating it to sister institutions 
in England or Germany, would be productive of 
at least as much harm as good. If, for instance, 
in the hope of obtaining a perfect university, we 
were to abolish our dormitories, obliterate the dis¬ 
tinction between classes, abandon the entire sys¬ 
tem of marking, and transfer the task of main¬ 
taining order from the Parietal Committee to the 
civil police, we should no doubt be as much dis¬ 
appointed as the men of 1789, who attempted to 
make English institutions grow on French soil, 
and got a Bonaparte dynasty for their pains. 
There is a place as well as a time for all things, 
and a great deal will always have to be conceded 
to the habit which men have of getting used to 
old institutions and customs, and of disliking to 
see them too roughly dealt with. A German uni¬ 
versity is little else than an organized aggregate 
of lecture-rooms, libraries, laboratories, and other 
facilities for those who desire to study, — resem- 


University Reform . 289 

bling in this respect our scientific and professional 
schools. Our New England colleges, founded in 
a Puritan environment, less imbued with the 
modern spirit, and in many cases even dating 
from an earlier period, have always combined 
with their instruction more or less of coercion ; 
and have laid claim to a supervision over the de¬ 
meanour of their students, in the exercise of which 
the liberty of the latter is often egregiously inter¬ 
fered with. The freedom of the undergraduate 
at Harvard is hampered by restrictions, many of 
which, if once justifiable, have in the lapse of 
time grown to be quite absurd, and should cer¬ 
tainly be removed with all possible promptness: 
of these we shall speak presently. But to re¬ 
move all restrictions whatever with one and the 
same sweep of our reformatory besom would ex¬ 
cite serious and extensive popular distrust. The 
New England mind, which tolerates Maine liquor- 
laws and Sabbatarian ordinances and protective 
tariffs, would not regard with favour such a revo¬ 
lutionary measure. So much liberty would bear 
an uncanny resemblance to license, — a resem¬ 
blance which, we freely admit, might not at first 
be wholly imaginary. The college would lose 
much of its popularity ; young men would be 
Bent elsewhere to pursue their studies; and thus 

19 


290 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

great injury would be manifestly wrought to the 
cause of university reform, which must needs be 
supported to a considerable extent by popular 
sentiment in order duly to prosper. A large 
amount of discretion must therefore be used, even 
in the removal of those features wherein our col¬ 
leges compare unfavourably with those of other 
countries. But there are some respects in which 
the American university may claim a superiority 
quite unique, — some cases in which a radical 
change must ever be earnestly deprecated. That 
arrangement by virtue of which each student is 
a member, not only of the university, but of a 
particular class, is fraught with such manifold 
benefits that any advantages to be derived from 
giving it up must disappear when brought into 
comparison. No graduate needs to be told what 
a gap would be made in his social and moral cul¬ 
ture, if all the thoughts and emotions resulting 
from his relations to his classmates were to be 
stricken from it. For the genial nurture of the 
sympathetic feelings, the class system affords a 
host of favourable conditions which can ill be 
dispensed with. By means of it, the facilities of 
the university for becoming a centre of social no 
less than of intellectual development are greatly 
enhanced. On the other hand, it is not to be 


University Reform . 291 

denied that, in requiring students of all degrees of 
mental ability and working power to complete the 
same course of study in the same length of time, 
there is much irrationality as well as some in¬ 
justice. This evil, which is so seriously felt in 
American colleges, does not afflict the universities 
of England and Germany, where the class system 
is not in use. To obviate it, however, it is for¬ 
tunately not necessary to resign the advantages 
which that system alone is competent to secure. 
Partly by allowing greater option in the selection 
of studies, partly by extending the privilege, at 
present occasionally granted to students, of taking 
their degrees one or two years after the termina¬ 
tion of the regular course, sufficient recognition 
can be given to differences of mental capacity, 
without essentially infringing upon the individu¬ 
ality of the successive classes. Here, then, is a 
clear case in which a judicious reform might at¬ 
tain all the ends sought by a sweeping revolution, 
without incurring the grievous detriment which 
the latter would inevitably entail. We believe 
that the same principle will apply in nearly every 
case; that it is possible to secure all the most 
valuable benefits conferred by European systems, 
without sacrificing the fundamental elements of 
our own; and that, by uniformly shaping our 


292 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

ameliorative projects with conscious reference to 
such an end, the efficiency of our university will 
be most successfully maintained, and its prosper¬ 
ity most thoroughly insured. 

Next, in order to impart to our notions of re¬ 
form the requisite symmetry and coherence, the 
legitimate objects of university education must be 
clearly conceived and steadfastly borne in mind. 
The whole duty of a university toward those who 
are sheltered within its walls may be concisely 
summed up in two propositions. It consists, first, 
in stimulating the mental faculties of each stu¬ 
dent to varied and harmonious activity, — in sup¬ 
plying every available instrument for sharpening 
the perceptive powers, strengthening the judg¬ 
ment, and adding precision and accuracy to the 
imagination; secondly, in providing for all those 
students who desire it the means of acquiring a 
thorough elementary knowledge of any given 
branch of science, art, or literature. In a word, 
to teach the student how to think for himself, 
and then to give him the material to exercise his 
thought upon, — this is the whole duty of a uni¬ 
versity. Into that duty the inculcation of doc¬ 
trines as such does not enter. The professor is 
not fulfilling his proper function when he incon¬ 
tinently engages in a polemic in behalf of this or 


University Reform . 293 

that favourite dogma. His business is to see that 
the pupil is thoroughly prepared and equipped 
with the implements of intellectual research, that 
he knows how to deduce a conclusion from its 
premise, that he properly estimates the value of 
evidence and understands the nature of proof ; 
he may then safely leave him to build up his 
own theory of things. His first crude conclu¬ 
sions may indeed be sadly erroneous, but they 
will be worth infinitely more than the most sal¬ 
utary truths acquired gratis, or lazily accepted 
upon the recommendation of another. It is de¬ 
sirable that our opinions should be correct, but 
it is far more desirable that they should be ar¬ 
rived at independently and maintained with intel¬ 
ligence and candour. Sceptical activity is better 
than dogmatic torpor; and our motto should be, 
Think the truth as far as possible, but, above all 
things, think. When a university throws its in¬ 
fluence into the scale in favour of any partys re¬ 
ligious or political, philosophic or aesthetic, it is 
neglecting its consecrated duty, and abdicating 
its high position. It has postponed the interests 
of truth to those of dogma. These are matters 
which our own university should seriously pon¬ 
der. It does not always strive so earnestly to 
make its students independent thinkers as to 


294 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

imbue them with opinions currently deemed 
wholesome. But science will never prosper in 
this way. Political economy will gain nothing 
by one-sided arguments against Malthus and Ri¬ 
cardo ; sound biological views will never be fur¬ 
thered by undiscriminating abuse of Darwinism; 
nor will the interests of religion be ever rightly 
subserved by threatening heretics with expulsion. 

An endless amount of discussion has been 
wasted over the question whether a mathemati¬ 
cal or a classical training is the more profitable 
for the majority of students. The comparative 
advantages of spending all one’s time upon one 
favourite pursuit, and of devoting more or less at¬ 
tention to various branches of study, have also 
supplied the text for much vague and unsatisfac¬ 
tory discourse. By the view of university edu¬ 
cation here adopted, these questions are placed 
in a somewhat favourable position for getting 
disposed of. The office of the university is not 
to enforce doctrine, but to point out method. It 
is not so much to cram the mind of the student 
with divers facts, which in after life it may be 
useful for him to have learned, as to teach him 
the proper mode of searching for facts, and of 
dealing with them when he has found them. As 


University Reform . 295 

Jacobs says, “It is of less importance in youth 
what a man learns than how he learns it.” 1 A 
fact considered in itself is usually a very stupid 
and quite useless object. Viewed in relation to 
other facts, as the illustration of a general prin¬ 
ciple, or as an item of evidence for or against a 
theory, it suddenly becomes both interesting and 
valuable. If the truth is to be told, by far the 
greater number of facts which are to be encoun¬ 
tered in the various departments of nature are to 
most persons utterly insignificant and unattrac¬ 
tive ; chiefly, because they have never been fur¬ 
nished with the means of estimating their illus¬ 
trative and evidentiary value. Universal logic, 
therefore, — the relations of phenomena to each 
other, and the methods of investigation and modes 
of proof applicable to widely different subjects, 
— should occupy an important place in college 
teaching. And that this end can be secured by 
studying any one kind of science alone is of course 
impossible. 

The advocate of the utility of mathematical 
studies, when confronted with the insurmountable 
fact that very little use is made of algebra and 
geometry in ordinary life, is wont to shelter him¬ 
self behind the assertion that nevertheless these 
1 Vermischte Schriften , III., § 27, p. 254. 


296 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

studies “ discipline the mind.” Though exqui¬ 
sitely vague, as thus expressed, this favourite 
apology is doubtless essentially valid. The al¬ 
most universal distaste for mathematics, 1 co-exist¬ 
ing as it does in many persons with excellent 
reasoning powers, proves that the faculty of 
imagining abstract relations is ordinarily quite 
feebly developed. Not reason, but imagination, 
is at fault. The passage from premise to con¬ 
clusion could easily be made, if the abstract rela¬ 
tions of position or quantity which are involved 
could be accurately conceived and firmly held in 
the mind. Now the ability to imagine relations 
is one of the most indispensable conditions of all 
precise thinking. No subject can be named, in 
the investigation of which it is not imperatively 
needed ; but it can nowhere else be so thoroughly 
acquired as in the study of mathematics. This 
fact alone is sufficient to justify the university in 
requiring its students to devote £ome attention to 
such a study. But the excellence of mathematics 
as an instrument of mental discipline by'no means 

1 Which probably attained its sublimest expression some years ago 
in the case of a Sophomore who, coming from Harvard Hall, where 
his “annual” had goaded him to desperation, was heard to declare, 
in language equally with Caligula’s deserving immortality, his wish 
that the whole of mathematical science might be condensed into a sin¬ 
gle lesson, that he might “ dead” on it all at once! 


University Reform . 297 

ends here. It is indeed a fallacy to suppose that 
greater certainty is attainable in geometry than 
elsewhere. Not greater certainty, but greater 
precision, is that which distinguishes the results 
obtained by mathematical deduction. Dealing 
constantly with definite or determinable magni¬ 
tudes, its processes are characterized by quantita¬ 
tive exactness. It is not obliged to pare off and 
limit its conclusions, to make them tally with 
concrete facts ; but can treat of length as if there 
were no such thing as breadth, and of plane sur¬ 
faces just as if solidity were unknown. It is thus 
the most perfect type of deductive reasoning; 
and if logical training is to consist, not in re¬ 
peating barbarous scholastic formulas or mechan¬ 
ically tacking together empty majors and minors, 
but in acquiring dexterity in the use of trust¬ 
worthy methods of advancing from the known to 
the unknown, then mathematical investigation 
must ever remain one of its most indispensable 
implements. Once inured to the habit of accu¬ 
rately imagining abstract relations, recognizing 
the true value of symbolic conceptions, and fa¬ 
miliarized with a fixed standard of proof, the 
mind is equipped for the consideration of quite 
other objects than lines and angles. The twin 
treatises of Adam Smith on social science, where- 


298 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

in, by deducing all human phenomena first from 
the unchecked action of selfishness and then from 
the unchecked action of sympathy, he arrives at 
mutually - limiting conclusions of transcendent 
practical importance, furnish for all time a bril¬ 
liant illustration of the value of mathematical 
methods and mathematical discipline. 

If magnitudes and quantities thus contemplated 
in the abstract yield such wholesome pabulum for 
the intellect, no less beneficial in many respects 
is the study of the direct applications of mathe¬ 
matics to the concrete phenomena of mechanics, 
astronomy, and physics. Not only do the numer¬ 
ous devices by which algebraic expressions are 
utilized in the solution of physical problems af¬ 
ford extensive scope for inventive ingenuity, but 
some familiarity with quantitative conceptions of 
the action and interaction of forces is eminently 
conducive to the entertainment of sound philo¬ 
sophic views. The reorganization of mechanics 
by Lagrange, and the beautiful construction by 
Fourier of a mathematical doctrine of heat, were 
innovations in philosophy as well as in science; 
and although the student can hardly be expected 
to gain even a rudimentary knowledge of these 
recondite subjects, he may at least with profit to 
himself be enabled to form some general notion 


University Reform. 299 

of the symbolic conceptions of force which they 
systematically embody. Of especial importance 
is the study of astronomy, both philosophically, 
as imparting a knowledge of the cosmic relations 
of our planet, and logically, as exhibiting in its 
highest perfection the deductive investigation of 
concrete phenomena. The right use of that in¬ 
dispensable but dangerous weapon of thought, 
hypothesis, can nowhere be so conveniently or 
so satisfactorily learned as in astronomy, where 
hypotheses have been more skilfully framed and 
successfully applied than in any other province 
of scientific research. 

But it is not by the study of mathematics and 
its applications alone that a comprehensive logical 
training can be acquired. There are other kinds 
of proof than mathematical proof; and the deduc¬ 
tive method is not the only method of reason¬ 
ing. In estimating the comparative advantages of 
mathematical and of classical discipline, too slight 
and too feeble recognition has been extended to 
the great body of inductive science, which has 
grown up and attained to philosophic significance 
only in quite modern times. Chemistry and con¬ 
crete physics have their means of arriving at 
truth, very different from those employed in 
mathematics, but quite as essential to sound 


300 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

scientific thinking. To acquire expertness and 
elegance in the use of deductive methods, while 
remaining contentedly ignorant of the fundamen¬ 
tal canons of induction, is to secure but a lame 
and one-sided mental development. It is often 
remarked that many men, whose opinions upon 
any subject with which they are familiar are sober 
enough, do not scruple to utter the most childish 
nonsense upon topics with which they are only 
partially acquainted. The reason is that they 
have learned to think correctly after some par¬ 
ticular fashion, but know nothing of the general 
principles on which thinking should be conducted. 
They are what is fitly called narrow-minded ; 
and since each branch of knowledge is more or 
less closely interlaced with every other branch, a 
searching scrutiny will usually show that even in 
their control of their own specialty there is ample 
room for improvement. Each science has its log¬ 
ical methods and its peculiar species of evidence; 
and to insure an harmonious development of the 
mental powers, there is no practicable way except 
to obtain a knowledge of all. 

To acquire such a command of scientific meth¬ 
ods, it is not necessary, even were it possible, to 
devote much study to the details of each separate 
science. To master the details of any single sci- 


University Reform . 301 

ence is a task for the accomplishment of which 
a lifetime is much too short. Recollecting, how¬ 
ever, that not doctrine, but method, is for the 
student the thing above all others needful, it 
will be seen that our scheme does not make too 
great demands even upon the limited time em¬ 
braced in a university course. The principles of 
investigation involved in every one of the induc¬ 
tive sciences might easily be learned in the time 
now devoted to the acquisition of facts in chem¬ 
istry alone. The college now attempts to teach 
chemistry as if each student might possibly come 
to be a physician, metallurgist, or pharmaceutist 
in after life. And the amount of time spent upon 
it is out of all proportion to that allotted to the 
other natural sciences, some of which, as anatomy 
and geology, are not even included in the regular 
course of electives. But total ignorance of or¬ 
gans and tissues is too great a price to pay for 
even an extensive acquaintance with acids and 
salts. The study of chemical details should be 
reserved for the elective course, of which we shall 
presently treat. The fundamental principles of 
chemistry, its relation to kindred sciences, the 
scope which it affords for observation and exper¬ 
iment, the philosophical value of its unrivalled 
nomenclature, — these are matters of universal 


302 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

importance, and their study forms an inseparable 
part of a catholic education. As thus conducted, 
the study of chemistry need not consume more 
than one third of the time at present assigned it, 
and other sciences, now sadly neglected, might 
assert their just claims to attention. 

Chemistry and molecular physics constitute the 
proper field for the employment of the purely 
inductive method. As we arrive at the organic 
sciences, deduction again assumes a prominent 
position. Of our three principal instruments for 
interrogating Nature, — observation, experiment, 
and comparison, — the second plays in biology a 
quite subordinate part. But while, on the one 
hand, the extreme complication of causes involved 
in vital processes renders the application of ex¬ 
periment altogether precarious in its results, on 
the other hand, the endless variety of organic 
phenomena offers peculiar facilities for the suc¬ 
cessful employment of comparison and analogy. 
Zoology and botany are pre-eminently the sciences 
of classification; and if skill in the use of this 
powerful auxiliary of thought is ever to be ac¬ 
quired, it must be sought in the comparative 
study of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. 
Theoretical logic may divide and sub-divide as 
much as it likes; but genera and species are dull 


University Reform . 303 

and lifeless things, when contemplated merely in 
their places upon a logical chart. To become cor¬ 
rect reasoners, it is not enough that we should 
know what classes and sub-classes are ; we should 
also know how to cunningly make them. From 
pure considerations of discipline, therefore, biol¬ 
ogy should form one of the regular studies of 
the university course, and some proficiency in it 
should be expected of every candidate for a bach¬ 
elor’s degree. Practical considerations also join 
in urging that steps should be taken to raise the 
organic sciences from the insignificant position 
now assigned them. If some sagacious traveller 
from a distant world, like Voltaire’s Micromdgas, 
were to visit Harvard College, he would doubtless 
give vent to unpleasant sarcasms concerning the 
profound anatomical ignorance of its graduating 
classes. He would pronounce it hardly creditable 
to the institution that men who have received its 
honours should be guilty of classifying cuttle-fishes 
with the vertebrata (we state facts), and should 
betray even less acquaintance with the structure 
of their own bodies than with the physical con¬ 
figuration of the moon. The scientific study of 
life has its practical as well as its speculative 
advantages. For want of sound views of biolog¬ 
ical method, intelligent persons are daily seen 


304 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

yielding faith to unscientific fallacies like those 
embodied in homoeopathy, or to wretched delu¬ 
sions like cranioscopic phrenology. 

It is therefore recommended that the time re¬ 
quired for the study of chemistry be limited to 
one term, instead of extending over three; that 
in the second term, along with the botany now 
taught, some instruction be given in general and 
comparative anatomy; to be followed, in the 
third, by a brief but comprehensive survey of 
physiology; while such knowledge of geology as 
is needful for the better understanding of these 
subjects might be simultaneously imparted by 
means of lectures. An arrangement of this sort 
would possess the signal advantage of throwing 
the organic sciences into their proper place, be¬ 
tween chemistry, upon which they partially de¬ 
pend, and psychology, to which they constitute 
the natural introduction. 

There is the less need for insisting upon the 
value of psychology, metaphysics, and logic, as 
instruments of mental discipline, since few per¬ 
sons are disposed to call it in question. In fol¬ 
lowing a difficult metaphysical discussion, all the 
intellectual faculties are brought into healthful 
activity; and although men may reason well 
without understanding the nature of the psychi- 


University Reform . 305 

cal processes, there is no doubt that an acquaint¬ 
ance with psychology guarantees its possessor 
against the adoption of many a plausible fallacy. 
After the student has acquired, through his scien¬ 
tific studies, some dexterity in the use of logical 
methods, he will approach, with all the more in¬ 
terest and enthusiasm, the study of those methods 
as organized into a coherent system. In view of 
what has already been said, it is almost unneces¬ 
sary to add that we do not regard the science of 
logic as consisting solely of the doctrine of the 
syllogism. It will no longer do to ignore the fact 
that induction has its tests and canons, as well as 
deduction. Mr. Mill’s great treatise has been be¬ 
fore the public for nearly a quarter of a century; 
and though far too learned and ponderous for a 
text-book, its introduction into the college course, 
in an epitomized form, would be attended with 
happy results. As for metaphysics, much of its 
value in education depends upon the catholicity 
of the spirit in which it is taught. Metaphysical 
doctrines are not so incontrovertibly established 
as the leading theorems of physical science. On 
nearly every question there are at least two mu¬ 
tually incompatible opinions, while on some points 
there are scores of such. The latest speculations 
do not, as usually happens in science, render an- 
20 


306 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

tiquated the older ones; and accordingly, in teach¬ 
ing metaphysics, extensive use should be made of 
the historical method of presentation. Recita¬ 
tions from the text-book might profitably be com¬ 
bined or alternated with lectures upon the history 
of philosophy, in which the aim should be to in¬ 
dicate as graphically as possible the relations sus¬ 
tained by each system to its predecessors. In de¬ 
fault of any such arrangement, the university 
already possesses, in the works of Sir William 
Hamilton, with their profound historical con¬ 
sciousness, as fair a substitute as mere text-books 
can furnish. 

The study of history, with reference to the 
scientific methods involved in it, would in a uni¬ 
versity be utterly impracticable. That there is a 
causal sequence, which must sooner or later admit 
of being formulated, in the tangled and devious 
course of human affairs, we not only readily 
grant, but we also steadfastly maintain. But 
speculations of this sort are too hopelessly ab¬ 
struse, and require too vast and minute a knowl¬ 
edge of details, to be profitably included even in 
the most advanced undergraduate course. His¬ 
torical laws cannot, like physical laws, be obtained 
from the inspection of a few crucial instances. 
The enormous heterogeneity of social phenomena 


University Reform, 307 

forbids their becoming amenable to any such pro¬ 
cess. Only in political economy, and to some ex¬ 
tent in ethics, where the action of certain moral 
forces is independently treated, can the student 
be expected to comprehend general truths. Far 
from being in a condition to appreciate general 
views of historic evolution, he is usually ignorant 
of most of the leading facts upon which they are 
founded. Historical instruction, therefore, must 
continue to consist chiefly in the exposition of 
details. It is important, however, that the atten¬ 
tion should be principally directed toward those 
events which have constituted turning-points in 
human progress. It is better to confine the atten¬ 
tion to a few cardinal epochs, like the rise of the 
Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Refor¬ 
mation, or the Revolt of the Netherlands, than to 
try to commit to memory a compendium like 
Michelet’s “ Precis,” which is nothing but a dis¬ 
jointed chronological table, a potpourri of un¬ 
meaning dates and unexplained occurrences, 
wherein trivial anecdotes and events of eternal 
significance are incontinently huddled together, 
without the slightest attempt at historical per¬ 
spective. Above all, the essential unity and con¬ 
tinuity of ancient and modern history should be 
kept steadily in view; and to this end, far more 


308 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

importance should be assigned to the history of 
Imperial Rome than is now the case. Ancient 
history will always, as at present, be best studied 
in connection with ancient languages and litera¬ 
ture. And this remark suggests the last of the 
subjects requiring notice in our brief survey, in 
proceeding to consider which let it be premised 
that the most inestimable benefits arising from 
the study of history are here passed over, as im¬ 
plied in what we shall have to say about the 
classics. 

If we have reserved the last place for the men¬ 
tion of classical studies, it is not because we es¬ 
teem them least in value. After what has been 
said concerning the advantages of mathematical 
and scientific training, our assertion of the para¬ 
mount importance of the classics will incur no 
risk of being ascribed to one-sided prejudice. We 
therefore make no scruple of recording our opin¬ 
ion that, both in quantity and in quality, the 
mental discipline obtainable from the intelligent 
study of the Greek and Latin languages equals 
that which can be acquired by any other educa¬ 
tional means whatever. To which it may be 
added that, if accuracy and precision are most 
thoroughly imparted by the study of exact science, 
on the other hand practical sagacity, catholic 


University Reform . 309 

sympathies, and breadth of view are the qualities 
most completely developed by philological and 
literary pursuits. Indeed, were it not for the 
amount of attention so generally bestowed upon 
the literatures and dialects of Greece and Rome, 
our intellectual sympathies would become con¬ 
tracted to a deplorable degree. As Dr. William 
Smith has observed, “ their civilization may be 
said to be our civilization, their literature is our 
literature, their institutions and laws have 
moulded and modified our institutions and laws ; 
and the life of the western nations of Europe is 
but a continuation of the life of Greece and 
Rome.” The reasons habitually adduced for 
studying the history of our own country and that 
of England, from which our political institutions 
most directly emanate, apply with scarcely inferior 
cogency to the study of that antique civilization, 
whence the best and most enduring elements of 
our social structure, our science, laws, and litera¬ 
ture, even most of our religious ideas, are ulti¬ 
mately derived. And how much or how little 
of ancient life can be comprehended without a 
knowledge of ancient languages we are willing 
to let every classically educated man declare for 
himself. There is thus a profound reason for the 
fact that universities have ever made the classic 


310 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

languages the basis of their instruction. The 
progress of modern discovery may greatly modify 
the circumstances under which this arrangement 
was originally made, but it can never entirely do 
away with them. Sanskrit, for instance, the im¬ 
mense importance of which we would be the last 
to underrate, can never be placed upon an equal 
footing with Latin and Greek. Valmiki and Kal¬ 
idasa, says Mommsen, are the precious treasures 
of literary botanists, but Homer and Sophokles 
bloom in our own garden. With Indian civili¬ 
zation we are but remotely connected ; and our 
obligations to Ceesar, Paul, and Aristotle will 
ever be infinitely greater than to Kanada or Sak- 
yamuni. The noble thoughts of Hellenic philos¬ 
ophers and Roman jurists have not only helped 
to inaugurate modern civilization, but have since 
continually reacted upon it. The impulse given 
to jurisprudence by the discovery of Justinian’s 
Pandects at Amalfi may have been exaggerated 
by uncritical historians, as Hallam and Savigny 
have maintained. But the Renaissance, with its 
innumerable consequences, will remain forever an 
abiding refutation of the detractors of classical 
studies. Well might the renewal of intercourse 
with antiquity be called a new birth for the mod¬ 
ern mind; it nerved it with vigour for its greatest 


University Reform . 311 

achievements. The spirit of Aristotle and Galen 
dwelt not with the stupid schoolmen who, parrot¬ 
like, repeated their doctrines, but with Galileo 
and Harvey, who overthrew them. 

Not only does classical scholarship ripen the 
judgment and widen the sympathies; it also af¬ 
fords unrivalled scope for the exercise of practical 
sagacity. In order to acquire tolerable proficiency 
in the use of an ancient language, it is necessary 
to go through with an endless amount of reason¬ 
ing, classifying, and guessing. Hypotheses must 
be skilfully framed, inferences must be correctly 
drawn, probabilities must be carefully balanced; 
a high degree of shrewdness must continually be 
applied to the solution of questions for the mo¬ 
ment of practical importance, and to the removal 
of constantly occurring practical difficulties. It 
is a grave error to suppose that all this mental 
exertion can take place without beneficial effect 
upon the after life of the student. Even if he is 
so unwise or so unfortunate as to allow his classi¬ 
cal attainments to slip from his memory, he will 
be the better fitted for all the business of life, by 
reason of the exercise which they have entailed. 
Whatever native keenness and capacity for pa¬ 
tient drudgery he may have in him will show it¬ 
self developed and strengthened, just as his alert- 


312 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

ness and muscular vigour will be the better for his 
early rowing and cricket-playing, though he may 
never touch bat or oar again. Impatient utili¬ 
tarianism, in directing all education to immediate 
practical ends, and in turning universities into 
polytechnic schools, sacrifices more than it gains. 
The example of Rawlinson, as it has been well 
observed, proves that a soldier does not fight the 
worse at Candahar because he has deciphered 
cuneiform inscriptions at Ecbatana: to which it 
may be added that Julius Cassar was not the 
worse general because he wrote on philology even 
in the midst of his wonderful campaigns; that 
men like Gladstone and Lewis are not worse, but 
better, statesmen because of their consummate 
classical scholarship; and that Henry Sumner 
Maine is not likely to prove less competent as a 
member of the Supreme Council of India because 
he is the author of the profoundest treatise ex¬ 
tant upon legal and social archaeology. 

Lastly, the current argument against classical 
studies, that, though imparting vigour and keen¬ 
ness to the mind, they are not immediately appli¬ 
cable to practical or professional purposes, is pre¬ 
cisely one of the strongest arguments in their 
favour. “ In proportion as the material interests 
of the present moment become more and more 


University Reform . 313 

engrossing, more and more tyrannical in their ex¬ 
actions, in the same proportion it becomes more 
necessary that man should fall back on the com¬ 
mon interests of humanity, and free himself from 
the trammels of the present by living in the past.” 
In this age of hurry and turmoil, these words of 
the lamented Donaldson are daily assuming more 
and more of vital significance. If there is ever 
to be a limit to the minute sub-division of labour, 
if the excessive specialization of employments is 
not to go on unchecked by counter-processes, if 
man is not to be degraded into a mere producing 
and manufacturing automaton, if individuality of 
character is destined to reassert its antique pre¬ 
eminence, this must be brought about by sedu¬ 
lously fostering those pursuits which are not di¬ 
rectly subservient to objects of narrow utility. 
And to this end, no studies can be more needful 
and appropriate than the studies of history, lan¬ 
guage, literature, and archaeology, — those studies 
which Steinthal, with reference to their effect 
upon the mind, has classified together and aptly 
entitled “ retrospective.” 1 They enlarge our 
mental horizon; they reveal our indebtedness to 
the patient thinkers and workers who have gone 
before us, and to whom we owe most of our pres- 
l De Pronomine Relativo, pp. 4, 5. 


314 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

ent comforts ; they cultivate our sympathy with 
the joys and sorrows, the hopes and disappoint¬ 
ments, of past generations ; they preserve us from 
the worst effects of the petty annoyances and 
carking anxieties of daily life, — the tiepipval /2«d- 
tikcll, against which the highest religious and eth¬ 
ical teaching has solemnly warned us. These are 
benefits too priceless to be thrown away, in order 
that our young men may gain a year or two for 
their professional labours; and they are amply 
sufficient to justify the university in continuing, 
as it has always done, to make classical scholar¬ 
ship an indispensable part of a liberal education. 

Our hasty survey of these various departments 
of study brings to light claims on the part of 
each one which cannot wisely be ignored. In 
order adequately to perform its first great duty 
of evoking the mental capacities, the university 
must extend some recognition to all. Some pro¬ 
ficiency in mathematics, in each of the physical 
and moral sciences, in history, and in classics 
should be demanded of every student who wishes 
to take a degree. The amount of work needful 
to be done in each of these branches in order to 
satisfy the requirements of a liberal education, it 
is for professors and tutors to determine. But 


University Reform. 315 

we may here extend to all required studies the 
suggestion already made in regard to chemistry, 
that only a minimum of attainment should be 
expected of the whole body of students. In the 
case of the sciences, only so much attention should 
be given to details as is requisite for the compre® 
hension of methods and general results. For this 
purpose, some knowledge of special facts is of 
course requisite. We cannot understand the 
atomic theory or the doctrine of definite propor¬ 
tions without knowing something about oxygen, 
hydrogen, and the other elements; but it is not 
necessary to learn all the ways in which the 
metals are extracted from their ores. To under¬ 
stand methods and results in biology, we need to 
be acquainted with organs, fluids, and tissues, and 
to have some knowledge of function as well as 
of structure; but we need not enter into the mer¬ 
its and shortcomings of Mr. Gulliver’s theory of 
inflammation, or be particular as to the proper 
classification of the Bryozoa. The mathemati¬ 
cal course might perhaps be allowed to close with 
plane trigonometry, and the course in classics 
might be materially abridged. Far less attention 
might be given to supremely useless matters, like 
Greek prosody ; and the time now spent in com¬ 
mitting to memory arbitrary rules for the scan- 


316 


Darwinism and Other Essays . 

ning of choral passages in ^Eschylus would thus 
be saved for the study of ancient history and pol¬ 
itics, in which important branches the require¬ 
ments of the university have not yet attained even 
a respectable minimum. Doubtless in many other 
respects the amount of compulsory study might 
be curtailed. But these hints are merely thrown 
out by way of illustration. In a matter demand¬ 
ing so much circumspection, only the wisdom and 
experience of practised instructors are competent 
to decide. Satisfactory results could easily be 
obtained, if the head of each department were to 
fix the minimum to be required in his own spe¬ 
cialty, subject to the concurrence of the repre¬ 
sentatives of all the other departments. The 
course of study, thus regulated, would slightly 
resemble what at Oxford is called the “ pass- 
course,” and all parts of it should be made com¬ 
pulsory for all students. 

In advocating the adoption of a required course 
so extensive and yet so elementary, our aim is 
not to encourage crude smattering or vain scio¬ 
lism, but to enable the student to approach his 
own special subject in the light thrown upon it 
by widely different subjects, and with the varied 
mental discipline which no single study is com¬ 
petent to furnish. Nature is not a mere juxtapo* 


University Reform, 317 

sition of parts, but a complex organic whole ; and 
the different branches of science are so closely 
allied that, without a general knowledge of all, 
we cannot have a complete comprehension of any. 
From the lack of a well-defined knowledge of 
the boundaries which divide chemistry from phys¬ 
iology, many eminent chemists of the present 
century, including such men as Raspail, Berthol- 
let, and even Liebig, have attempted to treat 
physiological questions by methods of investiga¬ 
tion applicable only to chemical questions. There 
has thus arisen an ill-digested mass of specula¬ 
tion, embracing some inquiries which are purely 
chemical, and others which are purely physiolog¬ 
ical, to which has been given the name of Or¬ 
ganic Chemistry. The amount of misdirected 
theorizing which resulted from this confusion of 
subjects and methods it would be no light task 
to estimate. The doctrine of definite proportions 
was assailed, the distinction between ultimate and 
immediate analysis was lost sight of, and theories 
of respiration and animal heat were propounded, 
whose rare beauty and artistic symmetry of con¬ 
ception rendered only the more palpable and de¬ 
plorable their extreme logical deficiency. This 
example, out of many which might be given, will 
suffice to illustrate our present position, that uni- 


318 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

versal philosophic culture is essential to the right 
understanding of any one science. 

But a general elementary training we deem 
serviceable only in so far as it is ancillary to the 
intelligent study of special subjects; and in pro¬ 
viding for the former, our scheme of education is 
only half completed. Provision must also be 
made for the latter. Along with the pass-course 
at Oxford, there is another system of study, mak¬ 
ing quite different demands upon the energies 
of the student, and called the class-course . Our 
system of minimums likewise needs to be supple¬ 
mented by a course entailing far greater labour, 
and crowned with still higher results. In re¬ 
ducing, as here recommended, the amount of work 
in the required studies, in uniformly postponing 
doctrine to method, in contemplating scientific 
truths only in their general bearings, and in ex¬ 
tending its instruction over so wide a field, the 
university will have secured but one of its great 
educational ends. It will have supplied the in¬ 
struments for investigation; it must now supply 
the material. In order to discharge its second 
great duty of providing each student with the 
means of thoroughly conducting special duties, 
the university should introduce an extensive and 
well-regulated system of electives. For this we 


University Reform . 319 

have an obvious analogue in the usage of our an¬ 
cestral institution in England. We allude, of 
course, to the triposes of the University of Cam¬ 
bridge, so called, not from anything triple or 
tripartite in their structure, but because of the 
“ stool or tripos on which the bachelor of the day 
sat before the proctors during the disputations on 
Ash-Wednesday.” Along with the course of 
required studies, remodelled according to the 
principles here laid down, a series of triposes 
should be instituted. The classic languages, with 
ancient history and ancient philosophy, would 
naturally constitute one tripos; a second might 
be made up of pure and applied mathematics; a 
third, of chemistry and the organic sciences; a 
fourth, of psychology, logic, and the history of 
philosophy; a fifth, of modern history, political 
economy, and elementary law ; while a sixth might 
be assigned to modern languages and general phi¬ 
lology. At the beginning of the Sophomore year, 
— when, as we shall presently see, matriculation 
should be granted and the proper university course 
should commence, — the student should be al¬ 
lowed to select one or more of these triposes, in 
which to pursue his studies until graduation. As 
in each tripos the degree of proficiency requisite 
in order to graduate with honour should obviously 


320 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

be placed very high, few students would think it 
advisable to take up more than one. Thus or¬ 
ganized, the system of triposes would for all prac¬ 
tical purposes correspond to the Oxford class- 
course. 

Many students will in every year be found will¬ 
ing to content themselves with the pass-course. 
They have no desire to do more than the mini¬ 
mum of work needful in order to get through col¬ 
lege without disgrace. Or perhaps they are feeble 
in health, or have been imperfectly trained at 
school, and cannot therefore expect to do justice 
to the severe requirements of a tripos. These 
should be allowed to act their pleasure : the edu¬ 
cation they will get from the pass-course is vastly 
better than none ; and there are better means 
than direct compulsion for inducing the student 
to follow the more laborious and profitable path. 
Either a higher degree should reward the perse¬ 
verance of the class-man, as some have already 
suggested, or the maximum of credit should, for 
the pass-man, be reduced by one half or even by 
two thirds. In any case, all the honours of the 
university, all its scholarships, prizes, and emolu¬ 
ments, should be strictly reserved for those who 
have distinguished themselves in a tripos. Be¬ 
sides this, for the class-men, the constraint of com- 


University Reform . 321 

pulsory attendance upon recitations and lectures 
should be materially diminished. Every one pos- 
sessed of the requisite experience knows that, for 
the able and diligent student, too frequent recita¬ 
tion is not only a hardship, but a hindrance. The 
explanations of the professor, adapted as they 
must be to the comprehension of all his hearers, 
are often entirely superfluous to any one who has 
properly gone over the subject beforehand; while 
listening to the awkward blunders of dull or lazy 
classmates is not only a waste of time, but an irri¬ 
tation to the nerves. Nor could any class-man be 
expected to acquit himself satisfactorily upon his 
final examination, if three hours were to be sub¬ 
tracted from his time for study each day. Four 
or five recitations every week in the studies of 
the tripos would be amply sufficient. The class- 
man should also be exempted from pursuing that 
portion of the pass-course covered by the subjects 
embraced in his tripos. Obviously, he who se¬ 
lects Latin and Greek for his special studies will 
gain nothing by following the instruction given 
upon those subjects to the pass-men, though in 
all other departments he must keep up to the 
minimum required. As a further means of re¬ 
lieving class-men from the distractions of contin¬ 
ual recitation, and in order to provide all stm 
21 


322 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

dents with a wholesome incentive to exertion, a 
conditional exemption from recitations might be 
granted in the studies of the pass-course. For 
example, all persons attaining a certain standard 
of excellence in the monthly examination might 
be required to attend only half the stated num¬ 
ber of recitations for the month following. The 
next examination would afford both a test of the 
faithfulness with which the student had employed 
the time thus left to his control, and an occasion 
for withdrawing the privilege in case of its abuse. 
Some such system as this might be put into oper¬ 
ation even in the present state of affairs. Its 
merits, in creating a powerful yet thoroughly nat¬ 
ural motive for promptness and diligence, are 
perfectly apparent. It goes far toward obviating 
the defects of the system of compulsory attend¬ 
ance, while it does not ignore the value of that 
discipline which can only be got from occasional 
intercourse with tutors and fellow-students in the 
recitation-room. 

The advantages of solving problems, constru¬ 
ing an ancient author, or rehearsing the results 
of one’s reading in the presence of classmates and 
subject to professorial criticism are indeed suffi¬ 
ciently obvious. Skill in acquiring knowledge 
ought certainly to be accompanied by skill in re- 


University Reform. 323 

producing it; nor would the student be likely to 
do credit to himself in the examination, who 
should fail previously to test his powers of an¬ 
swering questions on the spur of the moment. 
But the business of recitation should not be con¬ 
fined to going over in public what has already 
been gone over in private. The instructor’s su¬ 
perior knowledge and more extensive sources of 
information should be applied to the elucidation 
of the subject in hand. Questions should be freely 
asked, and discussion, wherever relevant, should 
be encouraged. Thus conducted, the recitation 
would fulfil its appropriate function of making 
good the shortcomings inherent in a system of 
merely private study, of supplying illustrations 
which cannot be found in text-books, and of 
smoothing the difficulties which from time to time 
beset the student in his progress. 

Viewed in this light, the recitation is properly 
an auxiliary to study, rather than a gauge of the 
student’s attainments. The latter purpose can be 
adequately subserved only by the examinations, 
on which the rank assigned to the student should 
exclusively depend. The marks given on indi¬ 
vidual recitations are nearly worthless as an index 
of scholarship. By dint of u cramming,” the use 
of keys, translations, and other abominations, a 


324 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

delusive show of knowledge can easily be pro¬ 
duced, which may answer the demands of the mo¬ 
ment, but which a shrewd examination will inevi¬ 
tably dispel. If recitations were not allowed to 
influence rank, and were conducted in the con¬ 
versational manner here recommended, the chief 
temptation to the employment of these wretched 
subterfuges would be at once removed. Accuracy 
of scholarship can never be looked for in a man 
who refuses to grapple with obstacles himself; 
and to translations in particular it may be ob¬ 
jected that, being not always executed by com¬ 
petent scholars, their interpretations of difficult 
passages are often quite untrustworthy. Any 
system of conducting recitation, whose tendency 
is to banish these treacherous guides from the 
precincts of the university, is by that circum¬ 
stance alone recommended at the outset. 

The object of the triposes is to encourage mi¬ 
nute and thorough scholarship. To this end, the 
distribution of honours should be determined by 
the results of a competitive examination held at 
the close of the college course, in which the re¬ 
quirements should be so great, and the questions 
so searching, as to render hopeless all attempts at 
succeeding by surreptitious means. At Oxford, 
for instance, the final class-papers in mathematics 


University Reform . 325 

include questions covering the whole subject of 
pure and mixed mathematics; and there is no 
reason why our standard of proficiency should not 
be equally high, since in a purely optional course 
neither inability nor distaste for the subject can 
reasonably be pleaded. From the classical stu¬ 
dent, besides thorough familiarity with the text 
and subject-matter of at least ten difficult authors, 
we should demand a knowledge of ancient history 
at once extensive and accurate, as well as some 
skill in treating the higher problems of philology 
and criticism. And in the other class examina¬ 
tions the requirements should be similar. With 
such an organization, it would be strange if the 
university did not each year send forth a consid¬ 
erable number of persons in every way prepared 
to become finished scholars. With the compul¬ 
sory system reduced to the lowest practicable 
minimum, and the elective system carried out 
with the greatest possible completeness, the chief 
ends of a liberal education can most effectually be 
secured; and the most excellent features of the 
European university will thus be adopted without 
resigning any single point of superiority possessed 
by the American college. 

As already hinted, the existing constitution of 
the freshman year should not be materially in- 


326 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

fringed. A course of study like the one here de¬ 
scribed cannot profitably be undertaken without 
more thorough elementary preparation than the 
student is likely to obtain at school. In such a 
country as England, where a dense population is 
confined to a small area, and where a considerable 
degree of uniformity prevails in the civilization 
of different localities, all the necessary work pre¬ 
liminary to a university career can easily be per¬ 
formed in the great public schools. If, however, 
the present population of England were loosely 
spread over all the country between the Atlantic 
and the Dnieper, and if, while some parts were as 
highly educated as London, other parts were as 
poorly educated as Dalmatia, the state of things 
would be analogous to that which now exists in 
our own country. It is in conformity with these 
different circumstances that our system of edu¬ 
cation must be organized. We have no Eton or 
Rugby; but we have hundreds of schools for el¬ 
ementary education, scattered over an immense 
tract of country, and differing widely in the 
amount and quality of the instruction which they 
impart to their pupils. The social environment 
in which they are situated is usually very differ¬ 
ent from that of Cambridge; and the especial 
preparation of students for Harvard College can* 


University Reform . 327 

not, except, perhaps, in Massachusetts, be re- 
garded as one of the ends for which they exist. 
While the student coming from New England or 
any of the adjacent states is likely to be well 
prepared to begin his studies at Harvard, the stu¬ 
dent who comes from the West or from the South 
is equally likely to be ill prepared. These dis= 
advantages are now to a great extent compen¬ 
sated under the rSgime of the freshman year, 
and the circumstances by which they are occa¬ 
sioned furnish a sufficient reason for retaining 
that year as a period of probation, instead of 
giving it up altogether, or of making it a part of 
the regular university course. It should there¬ 
fore, we think, be retained in its present form, 
with an examination both at its beginning and at 
its close, upon the latter of which the attainment 
of matriculation should be made to depend. 

Our brief sketch of a university reform would 
not be complete without a few remarks upon the 
numerous police restrictions by which, at Harvard 
and elsewhere, the American student is gratui¬ 
tously harassed. 1 When the university under¬ 
takes to prescribe the colour of the student’s 
dress, to determine when and where he shall 
smoke his cigar in the streets, and under what 

1 Statutes of Harvard College, ch. x., § 101. 


328 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

conditions he shall keep a dog or a horse, it is 
not only exceeding its proper functions, but it is 
also forgetting its own dignity. Years ago, when 
black broadcloth was generally considered the 
only suitable material for a gentleman’s coat, and 
when none but truckmen and coal-heavers smoked 
in the streets, these laws might have been rea¬ 
sonable, though they were not even therefore 
necessarily justifiable. Now they have neither 
reason nor justice to recommend them. The state 
of things to meet which they were framed has 
entirely passed away, and the result of maintain¬ 
ing and even partially enforcing them is to widen, 
instead of closing, the social gulf which is fixed 
between instructors and students. Only when 
this chasm is removed by more familiar inter¬ 
course, and by the abolition of the petty re¬ 
straints which have in times past caused students 
to regard with distrust and suspicion the officers 
placed over them, can the graver evils of college 
life, such as hazing and rowdyism, be effectually 
done away with. The self-respect awakened in 
the mind of the student by treating him as a gen¬ 
tleman will go much farther toward insuring his 
gentlemanly behaviour than all the censorial laws 
which corporations can frame and proctors ex¬ 
ecute. That undergraduates have too often de. 


329 


University Reform . 

meaned themselves like grown-up children follows 
naturally from the circumstance that they have 
to an extent only too great been regarded as 
such. 

That a limited amount of penal legislation is 
needful, under the present constitution of our 
colleges, we have already admitted. If the sys¬ 
tem of compulsory attendance upon lectures, reci¬ 
tations, and the roll-call — currently known as 
“ morning prayers ” — is not entirely to be given 
up, some penalty must await non-attendance. But 
that this penalty should interfere with the rank 
of the student, should affect his apparent scholar¬ 
ship, is utterly absurd. There is conspicuous ab¬ 
surdity in the state of things which allows a man 
who has attained an average mark of seven 
eighths to graduate without honour, because of 
his irregular attendance upon college exercises. 
His low rank is considered by the public to be 
an evidence of inferior scholarship; nor will any 
amount of mere explanation suffice to remove the 
impression. The old system of fining would be 
far preferable to this. As for rioting, sedition, 
and gross indecorum, they should, after due warn¬ 
ing, be visited with expulsion. Further than this, 
the penal legislation of the university cannot le¬ 
gitimately extend. 


330 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

Such in its leading outlines is the scheme of 
university reform which has long been present, 
with more or less distinctness, to the mind of the 
writer. We are not sufficiently vain or sanguine 
to hope that it will at once recommend itself to 
those in whose hands the work of reform has been 
placed. We have throughout, however, avoided 
the discussion of Utopian measures for the attain¬ 
ment of ideal excellence, and have proposed no 
innovations for which we do not consider the times 
to be fully ripe, and the means of execution en¬ 
tirely at command. If our suggestions shall have 
at all contributed to fix and give shape to the 
floating ideas of any graduate who may be now 
first approaching the subject of reform, their end 
will be amply subserved. Something would have 
been said, had space allowed, on the important 
subject of a post-graduate course. But for the 
present we must be content with directing the at¬ 
tention of the alumni and the public to the im¬ 
perative need which exists for an arrangement 
whereby those graduates who desire it shall be 
enabled to pursue their studies indefinitely, under 
the shadow of the university. Only under such 
a system can we make due provision for thorough 
scholarship. Our literature cannot hope to com, 
pete with that of other countries, so long as our 


University Reform . 331 

young men of literary taste and ability have no 
choice but to embark in an active profession, or 
engage in mercantile employments. To institute 
a number of fellowships — the essential condition 
of a post-graduate course — will require, no doubt, 
a much greater revenue than the university has 
now at its disposal. But the end which is not 
straightway attainable should still be kept stead¬ 
ily in view. A system of post-graduate instruc¬ 
tion is, we repeat, the great need both of the uni¬ 
versity and of the country. Literature, science, 
and high scholarship have never prospered where 
they have not been recognized as legitimate spe¬ 
cial pursuits. Individual zeal and genius may in¬ 
deed perform wonders, but they cannot supply the 
place of systematic organization. Our mother 
university has in recent days enriched mankind 
by the labours of a Donaldson, a Munro, and a 
Merivale; and when we, by means of a well- 
organized system of fellowships, are able to do 
likewise, our country also may hope to rival its 
mother in learning and scholarship, as it now 
rivals her in material prosperity. 

October, 1866. 


XV. 


A librarian’s work. 

I AM very frequently asked what in the world 
a librarian can find to do with his time, or am 
perhaps congratulated on my connection with 
Harvard College Library, on the ground that, 
“being virtually a sinecure office (!), it must 
leave so much leisure for private study and work 
of a literary sort.” Those who put such ques¬ 
tions, or offer such congratulations, are naturally 
astonished when told that the library affords 
enough work to employ all my own time, as well 
as that of twenty assistants ; and astonishment is 
apt to rise to bewilderment when it is added that 
seventeen of these assistants are occupied chiefly 
with “ cataloguing; ” for generally, I find, a li¬ 
brary catalogue is assumed to be a thing that is 
somehow “made” at a single stroke, as Aladdin’s 
palace was built, at intervals of ten or a dozen 
years, or whenever a “new catalogue ” is thought 
to be needed. “ How often do you make a cata¬ 
logue ? ” or, “ When will your catalogue be com- 


A Librarian's Work. 


833 


pleted?” are questions revealing such transcen¬ 
dent misapprehension of the case that little but 
further mystification can be got from the mere 
answer, “We are always making a catalogue, and 
it will never be finished.” The “ doctrine of spe¬ 
cial creations,” indeed, does not work any better 
in the bibliographical than in the zoological world. 
A catalogue, in the modern sense of the term, is 
not something that is “ made ” all at once, to last 
until the time has come for it to be superseded by 
a new edition, but it is something that “grows,” 
by slow increments, and supersedes itself only 
through gradual evolution from a lower degree of 
fulness and definiteness into a higher one. It is 
perhaps worth while to give some general explana¬ 
tion of this process of catalogue-making, thus an¬ 
swering once for all the question as to what may 
be a librarian’s work. There is no better way to 
begin than to describe, in the case of our own li¬ 
brary, the career of a book from the time of its 
delivery by the expressman to the time when it 
is ready for public use. 

New American books, whether bought or pre¬ 
sented, generally come along in driblets, two or 
three at a time, throughout the year; large boxes 
of pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, trade-cata¬ 
logues, and all manner of woful rubbish (the ref- 


334 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

use of private libraries and households) are sent 
in from time to time ; and books from Europe ar¬ 
rive every few weeks in lots of from fifty to three 
or four hundred. It is in the case of foreign books 
that our process is most thoroughly systematized, 
and here let us take up our illustrative example. 

When a box containing three or four hundred 
foreign books has been unpacked, the volumes are 
placed, backs uppermost, on large tables, and are 
then looked over by the principal assistant, with 
two or three subordinates, to ascertain if the 
books at hand correspond with those charged in 
the invoice. As the titles are read from the in¬ 
voice, the volumes are hunted out and arranged 
side by side in the order in which their titles are 
read, while the entry on the invoice is checked in 
the margin with a pencil. These pencil-checks 
are afterwards copied into the margins of the 
book in which our lists of foreign orders are regis¬ 
tered, so that we may always be able to deter¬ 
mine, by a reference to this book, whether any 
particular work has been received or not. This 
order-book, with its marginal checks, is the only 
immediate specific register of accessions kept by 
us, as our peculiar system entails considerable 
delay in bringing up the “ accessions-catalogue.” 

After this preliminary examination and regis* 


A Librarian's Work. 


335 


try, the books are ready for me to look over, and 
I must first decide to what “ fund ” each book en¬ 
tered on the invoice must be charged. The uni¬ 
versity never buys books with its general funds, 
but uses for this purpose the income of a dozen 
or more small funds, given, bequeathed, or sub¬ 
scribed, expressly for the purchase of books. 
Sometimes the donors of such funds allow us to 
get whatever books we like with the money, but 
more often they show an inclination to favour the 
growth of departments in which they feel a per¬ 
sonal interest. Thus the munificent bequest of 
the late Mr. Charles Sumner is appropriated to 
the purchase of works on politics and the fine 
arts, while Dr. Walker’s bequest provides more 
especially for theology and philosophy, and the 
estate of Professor Farrar still guards the inter¬ 
ests of mathematics and physics. Under such 
circumstances, it is of course necessary to keep a 
separate account with each fund, and the data for 
such an account are provided by charging every 
new book as it arrives. On the margin of the 
invoice the names of the different funds are writ¬ 
ten in pencil against the entries, while the assist¬ 
ants separate the books into groups according to 
the funds to which they are charged. Five or six 
more assistants now arriving on the scene, the 
work of “ collating ” begins. 


836 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

Properly speaking, to u collate ” is to compare 
two things with each other, in order to estimate 
or judge the one by a reference to the other taken 
as a standard. In our library usage the word has 
very nearly this sense when duplicate copies of 
the same work are collated, to see whether they 
coincide page for page. But as we currently use 
the word, to collate a book is simply to examine 
it carefully from beginning to end, to see whether 
every page is in its proper place and properly 
numbered, whether any maps or plates are miss¬ 
ing or misplaced, whether the back is correctly 
lettered, or whether any leaves are so badly torn 
or defaced as to need replacing. In English cloth- 
bound books this scrutiny involves the cutting of 
the leaves, — a tedious job which in half-bound 
books from the Continent is seldom required. En 
revanche , however, the collating of an English 
book hardly ever brings to light any serious de¬ 
fect, while in the make-up of French and German 
books the grossest blunders are only too common. 
Figures are unaccountably skipped in numbering 
the pages; plates are either omitted or are so 
bunglingly numbered that it is hard to discover 
whether the quota is complete or not; title-pages 
are inserted in the wrong places; sheets are 
wrongly folded, bringing the succession of pages 


A Librarian’s Work. 


337 


into dire confusion; sometimes two or three sheets 
are left out, and sometimes, where a work in ten 
volumes is bound in five, you will find that the 
first of these contains two duplicate copies of Vol. 
I., while for any signs of a Vol. II. you may seek 
in vain. In all bungling of this kind the Ger¬ 
mans are worse than the French; but both are 
bad enough when contrasted with the English, 
either of the Old World or of the New. 

This work of collating is in general of lower 
grade than the work of cataloguing, and can be 
entrusted to the less experienced or less accom¬ 
plished assistants; but to some extent it is shared 
by all, and where difficulties arise, or where some 
book with Arabic or Sanskrit numbering turns 
up, an appeal to headquarters becomes necessary. 
When a book has been collated, the date of its 
reception and the name of the fund to which it 
has been charged are written in pencil on the 
back of the title-page, and at the bottom of the 
title-page, to the left of the imprint, is written 
some modification of the letter C, C', C°, C 1 , etc., 
which is equivalent to the signature of the assist¬ 
ant who has done the collating and is responsible 
for its accuracy. 

After this is all over, the books, still remaining 
grouped according to their “ funds,” are ready to 
22 


838 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

have the “seals” put in. The seal is the label 
of ownership, bearing the seal of the university 
and the name of the fund or other source from 
which the book has been procured, and is pasted 
on the inside of the front cover. Above it, in the 
left corner, is pasted a little blank corner-piece, 
on which is to be marked in pencil the number of 
the alcove and shelf where the book is to be 
placed, or “set up.” 

To set up a book on a shelf is no doubt a very 
simple matter, yet it involves something more 
than the mere placing of the volume on the shelf. 
Each alcove in the library has a “shelf-cata¬ 
logue,” or list of all the books in the alcove, ar¬ 
ranged by shelves. Such a catalogue is indispen¬ 
sable in determining whether each shelf has its 
proper complement of volumes, and whether, at 
the end of the year, all the books are in their 
proper places. When the book is duly entered 
on this shelf-catalogue, and has its corner-piece 
marked, it is at last ready to be “ catalogued.” 
After our lot of three or four hundred books have 
been treated in this way, they are delivered to 
the principal assistant, who parcels them out 
among various subordinate assistants for catalogu¬ 
ing. 

Here we enter upon a very wide subject, and 


A Librarian'8 Work. 


339 


one that is not altogether easy to expound to the 
uninitiated. A brief historical note is needed, to 
begin with. In 1830 Harvard University pub¬ 
lished a printed catalogue (in two volumes, oc¬ 
tavo) of all the works contained in its library at 
that date. In 1833 a supplement was published, 
containing all the accessions since 1830, and these 
made a moderate-sized volume. Here is the es¬ 
sential vice of printed catalogues. Where the 
number of books is fixed once for all, — as in the 
case of a private library, the owner of which has 
just died, and which is to be sold at auction,— 
nothing is easier than to make a perfect catalogue, 
whether of authors or of subjects. It is very dif¬ 
ferent when your library is continually growing. 
By the time your printed catalogue is completed 
and published, it is already somewhat antiquated. 
Several hundred books have come in which are 
not comprised in it, and among these new books 
is very likely to be the one you wish to consult, 
concerning which the printed catalogue can give 
you no information. If you publish an annual 
supplement, as the Library of Congress does, then 
your catalogue will become desperately cumbrous 
within five or six years. When you are in a 
hurry to consult a book, it is very disheartening 
to have to look through half a dozen alphabets, 


340 Darwinism and Other Essays* 

besides depending after all on the ready memory 
of some library official as to the books which have 
come in since the last supplement was published. 

This inconvenience is so great that printed 
catalogues have gone into discredit in all the 
principal libraries of Europe. Catalogues are in¬ 
deed printed, from time to time, by way of pub¬ 
lishing the treasures of the library, and as biblio¬ 
graphical helps to other institutions ; but for the 
use of those who daily consult the library, man¬ 
uscript titles have quite superseded the printed 
catalogue. In European libraries this is done in 
what seems to us a rather crude way. Their 
catalogues are enormous brown paper blank- 
books or scrap-books, on the leaves of which are 
pasted thin paper slips bearing the titles of the 
books in the library. Large spaces are left for 
the insertion of subsequent titles in their alpha¬ 
betical order; and as a result of this method, the 
admirable catalogue of the library of the British 
Museum fills more than a thousand elephant 
folios! An athletic man, who has served his 
time at base-ball and rowing, may think little of 
lifting these gigantic tomes, but for a lady who 
wishes to look up some subject one would think 
it desirable to employ a pair of oxen and a wind¬ 
lass. 


A Librarian's Work . 


341 


All the libraries of western Europe which I 
have visited seem to have taken their cue from 
the British Museum. But in America we have 
hit upon a less ponderous method. To accom¬ 
plish this end of keeping our titles in their proper 
alphabetical order, we write them on separate 
cards, of stiff paper, and arrange these cards in 
little drawers, in such a way that any one, by 
opening the drawer and tilting the cards therein, 
can easily find the title for which he is seeking. 
Our new catalogue at Cambridge is a marvel of 
practical convenience in this respect. At each 
end the row of stiff cards is supported by bevelled 
blocks, in such a way that some title lies always 
open to view; and by simply tilting the cards 
with the forefinger, any given title is quickly 
found, without raising the card from its place in 
the drawer. 

In September, 1833, our library began its sec¬ 
ond supplement, consisting of two alphabetical 
manuscript catalogues. Volumes received after 
that date were catalogued upon stiff cards ar¬ 
ranged in drawers, while pamphlets were cata¬ 
logued, after the European fashion, on slips of 
paper pasted into great folio scrap-books. This 
distinction between pamphlets and volumes was a 
most unhappy one. To a fibranan the only prac- 


342 Darwinism and Other J Essays, 

tical difference between these two kinds of book 
is that the latter can generally be made to stand 
on a shelf, while the former generally tumbles 
down when unsupported. This physical fact 
makes it necessary to keep pamphlets in files by 
themselves until it is thought worth while to 
bind them. But for the purposes of cataloguing 
it makes no difference whether a book consists of 
twenty pages between paper covers or of five 
hundred pages bound in full calf. If you wish to 
find M. Leon de Rosny’s “ Aper§u general des 
Langues s^mitiques,” you do not care, and very 
likely do not know, whether it is a “ pamphlet ” of 
fifty pages or a “ volume ” of three hundred, and 
you naturally grumble at a system which sends 
you to a second alphabet in order to maintain a 
purely arbitrary and useless distinction. In prac¬ 
tice this double catalogue was found to be so in¬ 
convenient that in 1850, after the pamphlet titles 
had come to fill eight cumbrous volumes, it was 
abandoned, and henceforth pamphlets, as well as 
maps and engravings, were placed on the same 
alphabet with bound volumes. 

Before long, however, it began to be felt neces. 
sary to reform this whole cumbrous system. To 
ascertain whether a given work was contained in 
the library, one had now to consult four different 


343 


A Librarian's Work. 

alphabets, — the old printed catalogue, the first 
or printed supplement, the second or card supple¬ 
ment, and the eight ugly folios of pamphlet titles. 
These later supplements, moreover, being accessi¬ 
ble only to the librarian and his assistants, were 
of no use to the general public, who, for the 
135,000 titles added since 1833, were obliged to 
get their information from some of the officials. 
To remedy this state of things, a new card cata¬ 
logue, freely accessible to the public, and destined 
to embrace in a single alphabet all the titles in 
the library without distinction, was begun in 1861 
by my predecessor, Professor Ezra Abbot. This 
catalogue was not intended to supersede the pri¬ 
vate card supplement begun in 1833, which for 
many reasons it is found desirable to keep up. 
But for the use of the public it will, when fin¬ 
ished, supersede everything else, and become the 
sole authoritative catalogue of the library. Since 
1861 all new accessions have been put into this 
catalogue, while the work of adding to it the older 
titles has gone on with varying speed ; in 1869 it 
came nearly to a standstill, but was resumed in 
1874, and is now proceeding with great rapidity. 
About fifty thousand titles of volumes, and as 
many more of pamphlets, still remain to be added 


344 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

before this new catalogue can become the index 
to all the treasures of the library. 1 

Another great undertaking was begun simul¬ 
taneously in 1861. The object of an alphabetical 
catalogue like those above described is “ to enable 
a person to determine really whether any particu¬ 
lar work belongs to the library, and, if it does, 
where it is placed.” If you are in search of 
Lloyd’s “ Lectures on the Wave-Theory of Light,” 
you will look in the alphabetical catalogue under 
“ Lloyd, Humphrey.” Now this alphabetical ar¬ 
rangement is the only one practicable in a public 
library, because it is the only one on which all 
catalogues can be made to agree, and it is the 
only one sufficiently simple to be generally under¬ 
stood. For the purpose here required, of finding 
a particular work, an arrangement according to 
subject-matter would be entirely chimerical. 
Nothing short of omniscience could ever be sure 
of finding a given title amid such a heterogeneous 
multitude. Every man who can read knows the 
order of the alphabet, but not one in a thousand 
can be expected to master all the points that de¬ 
termine the arrangement of a catalogue of sub¬ 
jects,-— as, for example, why one of three kindred 

1 About seventeen thousand of these old titles were added during 
the two years ending in July, 1877. 


345 


A Librarian's Work. 

treatises should be classed under the rubric of 
Philosophy, another under Natural Religion, and 
a third under Dogmatic Theology. 1 But while it 
would thus be impracticable to place our final re¬ 
liance on any other arrangement than an alpha¬ 
betical one, it by no means follows that a subsidi¬ 
ary subject-catalogue is not extremely useful. He 
who knows that he wants Lloyd’s book on the 
undulatory theory is somewhat more learned in 
the literature of optics than the majority of those 
who consult libraries. For one who knows as 
much as this, there are twenty who know only 
that they want to get some book about the un¬ 
dulatory theory. Now a subject-catalogue is pre¬ 
eminently useful in instructing such people in the 
literature of the subject they are studying. They 
have only to open a drawer that is labelled “ Op¬ 
tics,” and run along the cards until they come to 
a division marked “ Optics — Wave-Theory ,” and 
there they will find perhaps a dozen or fifty titles 
of books, pamphlets, review articles, and memoirs 
of learned societies, all bearing on their subject, 
and enabling them to look it up with a minimum 
of bibliographical trouble. Such a classified cata¬ 
logue immeasurably increases the usefulness of a 

1 See the excellent remarks of Professor Jevons in his Principles of 
Science, ii. 401. 


346 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

library to the general public. At the same time, 
the skilful classification of books presents so many 
difficulties and requires so much scientific and 
literary training that it adds greatly to the labour 
of catalogue-making. For this reason great libra¬ 
ries rarely attempt to make subject - catalogues. 
At every library which I have happened to visit 
in England, France, Germany, and Italy, I have 
received the same answer: “ We do not keep any 
subject-catalogue, for we shrink from so formida¬ 
ble an undertaking.” With a boldness justified 
by the result, however, Professor Abbot began 
such a catalogue of the Harvard library in 1861, 
and carried out the work with the success that 
might have been expected from his truly stupen¬ 
dous erudition and most consummate ingenuity. 

It is sometimes urged that, in deference to the 
feebleness of human memory, an ideal library 
should have yet a third catalogue, arranged alpha¬ 
betically, not according to authors, but according 
to titles. This is to accommodate the man who 
knows that he wants “ Lectures on the Wave- 
Theory of Light,” but has forgotten the author’s 
name. In an “ideal” library this might perhaps 
be well. But in a real library, subject to the ordi. 
nary laws of nature, it is to be remembered that 
any serious addition to the amount of catalogue- 


A Librarian's Work. 347 

room or to the labour of the librarian and assist¬ 
ants is an expense which can be justified only by 
the prospect of very decided advantages. In most 
cases, the subject-catalogue answers the purposes 
of those who remember the title of a work, but 
have forgotten the author. In the very heteroge¬ 
neous classes of Drama and Fiction, where this is 
not so likely to be the case, the exigency is pro¬ 
vided for in Professor Abbot’s system by a full set 
of cross-references from titles to authors. 

From this account it will be seen that any new 
book received to-day by our library must be en¬ 
tered on three catalogues, — first on the card sup¬ 
plement which continues the old printed cata¬ 
logue, secondly on the new all - comprehensive 
alphabet of authors, thirdly on the classified in¬ 
dex of subjects. In our technical slang the first 
of these catalogues is known under the collective 
name of “the long cards,” the second as “the red 
cards,” the third as “ the blue cards,” — names 
referring to the shape of the cards and to certain 
peculiarities of the lines with which they are 
ruled. When our lot of three or four hundred 
books is portioned out among half a dozen assist¬ 
ants to be catalogued, the first thing in order is 
to write the “ long cards.” Each book must have 
at least one long card; but most books need more 


348 Darwinism and Other Assays. 

than one, and some books need a great many. 
Suppose you have to catalogue Mr. Stuart-Glen- 
nie’s newly-published “ Pilgrim Memories.” This 
is an exceedingly easy book for the cataloguer, 
but it requires two cards, because of the author’s 
compound name. The book must be entered 
under u Stuart-Glennie,” because that is the form 
in which the name appears on the title-page, and 
which the author is therefore supposed to prefer. 
It is very important, however, that a reference 
should be made from “ Glennie” to “ Stuart-Glen¬ 
nie,” else some one, remembering only the last 
half of the name, would look in vain for “ Glen¬ 
nie,” and conclude that the book was not in the 
library. 

Suppose, again, that your book is Jevons on 
“ Money and the Mechanism of Exchange.” This 
belongs to the “ International Scientific Series,” 
and therefore needs to be entered under “Jev¬ 
ons,” and again on the general card which bears 
the superscription “International Scientific Se¬ 
ries.” Without such a general entry, books are 
liable to be ordered and bought under one head¬ 
ing when they are already in the library and cata¬ 
logued under the other heading. The risk of 
such a mishap is small in the case of the new and 
well-known series just mentioned, but it is con- 


A Librarian's Work. 349 

siderable in the case of the different series of 
“ British State Papers,” or the “ Scelta di Curio¬ 
sity Italiane ; ” and of course one rule must be fol¬ 
lowed for all such cases. Suppose, again, that your 
book is Grimm’s “Deutsches Woerterbuch,” be¬ 
gun by the illustrious Grimm, but continued by 
several other hands. Here you must obviously 
have a distinct entry for each collaborator, and 
each of these entries requires a card. 

In writing the long card, the first great point 
is to ascertain every jot and tittle of the author’s 
name; and, as a general rule, title-pages are very 
poor helps toward settling this distressing ques¬ 
tion. For instance, you see from the title-pages of 
“ Money ” and “ Pilgrim Memories ” that the au¬ 
thors are “TP. Stanley Jevons,” and “John S, Stu- 
art-Glennie; ” but your duty as an accurate cat¬ 
aloguer is not fulfilled until you have ascertained 
what names the TP. and S. stand for in these 
cases. In the alphabetical catalogue of a great 
library, it is a matter of the first practical im¬ 
portance that every name should be given with 
the utmost completeness that the most extreme 
pedantry could suggest. No one who has not had 
experience in these matters can duly realize that 
the number of published books is so enormous as 
to occasion serious difficulty in keeping apart the 


350 Darwinism and Other Essays, 

titles of works by authors of the same name. 
“Stanley Jevons” and “Stuart - Glennie ” are 
very uncommon combinations of names; yet the 
occurrence of two or three different authors in an 
alphabetical catalogue, bearing this uncommon 
combination of names, would not be at all surpris¬ 
ing. 

Indeed, — to say nothing of the immense num¬ 
ber of accidental coincidences, — I think we may 
lay it down as a large comprehensive sort of rule, 
that any man who has published a volume or 
pamphlet is sure to have relatives of the same 
name who have published volumes or pamphlets. 
Such a fact may have some value to people, like 
Mr. Galton, who are interested in the subject of 
hereditary talent, and who have besides a keen 
eye for statistics. I have never tabulated the 
statistics of this matter, and am stating only a 
general impression, gathered from miscellaneous 
experience, when I say that the occurrence of al¬ 
most any name in a list of authors affords a con¬ 
siderable probability of its re-occurrence, asso¬ 
ciated with some fact of blood-relationship. One 
would not be likely to realize this fact in collect¬ 
ing a large private library, because private libra¬ 
ries, however large, are apt to contain only the 
classical works of quite exceptional men and the 


A Librarian's Work. 351 

less important works which happen to be specially 
interesting or useful to the owner. But in a pub¬ 
lic library the treasures and the rubbish of the 
literary world are alike hoarded; and the works of 
exceptional men whom everybody remembers are 
lumped in with the works of all their less distin¬ 
guished cousins and great-uncles, whose names the 
world of readers has forgotten. 

A librarian has the opportunity for observing 
many curious facts of this sort, but he will seldom 
have leisure to speculate about them. For while 
a great library is an excellent place for study and 
reflection, for everybody except the librarian, his 
position is rather a tantalizing one. In the midst 
of the great ocean of books, it is “ water, water 
everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” 

To make up for the extreme vagueness with 
which authors customarily designate themselves 
on their title-pages is the work of the assistants 
who write the long cards, and it is apt to be a 
very tedious and troublesome undertaking. Bio¬ 
graphical and bibliographical dictionaries, the 
catalogues of our own and other libraries, uni¬ 
versity-catalogues, army-lists, clerical directories, 
genealogies of the British peerage, almanacs, 
“ conversations - lexicons,” literary histories, and 
volumes of memoirs, — all these aids have to be 


852 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

consulted, and too often are consulted in vain, or 
give conflicting testimony which serves to raise 
the most curious and perplexing questions. To 
the outside world such anxious minuteness seems 
useless pedantry ; but any sceptic who should 
serve six months in a library would become con¬ 
vinced that without it an alphabetical catalogue 
would soon prove unmanageable. “ Imagine the 
heading ‘ Smith, J.,’ in such a catalogue ! ” says 
Professor Abbot. Where a name is very com¬ 
mon, we are fain to add whatever distinctive 
epithet we can lay hold of; as in the case of six 
entries of “ Wilson, William,” which are differ¬ 
enced by the addition of “ Scotch Covenanter,” 
“ poet, of London,” “ M. A., of Musselburgh,” “ of 
Poughkeepsie,” “Vicar of Walthamstow,” “Pres, 
of the Warrington Nat. Hist. Soc.” 1 

New difficulties arise when the title-page leaves 
it doubtful whether the name upon it is that of 
the author, or that of an editor or compiler. The 
names of editors and translators are often omitted, 
and must be sought in bibliographical dictionaries. 
Dedicatory epistles, biographical sketches, or in¬ 
troductory notices are often prefixed, signed with 

1 Sometimes these headings are very odd, as in the case of a host 
of “John Jacksons,” one of whom is neatly distinguished as “Jack 
son, John, murderer ,” — the work thus catalogued being the “con¬ 
fession ” of one John Jackson who had murdered his wife. 


A Librarian's Work . 


353 


exasperating initials, for a clue to which you may 
perhaps spend an hour or two in fruitless inquiry. 
In accurate cataloguing, all such adjuncts to a 
book must be noticed, and often require distinct 
reference - cards. Curious difficulties are some¬ 
times presented by the phenomena of compound 
or complex authorship, as in works like the Bol- 
landist “ Acta Sanctorum,” conducted by a group 
of men, some of whom are removed by death, 
while their places are supplied by new collabora¬ 
tors. Some other immense work, like Migne’s u Pa- 
trologise Cursus Completus,” will give rise to nice 
questions owing to the indefiniteness with which 
its various parts are demarcated from each other. 
Many German books, on the other hand, are 
troublesome from the excessive explicitness with 
which they are divided, with sub-titles and sub¬ 
sub-titles innumerable, in accordance with some 
subtle principle not always to be detected at the 
first glance. The proper mode of entry for re¬ 
ports of legal cases and trials, periodicals, and 
publications of learned societies, governments, 
and boards of commissioners, is sure to call for 
more or less technical skill and practical discrim¬ 
ination. Anonymous and pseudonymous works 
are very common, and even the best bibliograph¬ 
ical dictionaries cannot keep pace with the issue 


354 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

of them. Where we can find, by hook or by 
crook, the real name of the author of a pseudony¬ 
mous work, it is entered under the real name, 
with a cross-reference from the pseudonym. 
Otherwise it is entered provisionally under the 
fictitious name, as, for example, “ Veritas, 
yseudon .” Anonymous works are entered under 
the first word of the title, neglecting particles; 
and the head-line is left blank, so that if the au¬ 
thor is ever discovered, his name may be inserted 
there, enclosed within brackets. In former times 
it was customary for the cataloguer to enter such 
works under what he deemed to be the most im¬ 
portant word of the title, or the word most likely 
to be remembered; but in practice this rule has 
been found to cause great confusion, since people 
are by no means sure to agree as to the most im¬ 
portant word. To some it may seem absurd to en¬ 
ter an anonymous 44 Treatise on the Best Method 
of preparing Adhesive Mucilage ” under the word 
44 Treatise ” rather than under 44 Mucilage ; ” but 
it should be remembered that he who consults an 
alphabetical catalogue is supposed to know the 
title for which he is looking; and, in our own li¬ 
brary at least, any one who remembers only the 
subject of the work he is seeking can always refer 
to the catalogue of subjects. 


A Librarian's Work, 


355 


To treat more extensively of such points as 
these, in which none but cataloguers are likely to 
feel a strong interest, would not be consistent 
with the purpose of this article. For those who 
wonder what a librarian can find to do with his 
time, enough hints have been given to show that 
the task of “ just cataloguing a book ” is not, per¬ 
haps, quite so simple as they may have supposed. 
These hints have nevertheless been chosen with 
reference to the easier portions of a librarian’s 
work, for a description of the more intricate 
problems of cataloguing could hardly fail to be 
both tedious and unintelligible to the uninitiated 
reader. Enough has been said to show that a 
cataloguer’s work requires at the outset consider¬ 
able judgment and discrimination, and a great 
deal of slow, plodding research. "he facts which 
we take such pains to ascertain may seem petty 
when contrasted with the dazzling facts which are 
elicited by scientific researches. But in reality 
the grandest scientific truths are reached only 
after the minute scrutiny of facts which often 
seem very trivial. And though the little details 
which encumber a librarian’s mind do not minis¬ 
ter to grand or striking generalizations, though 
their destiny is in the main an obscure one, yet 
if they were not duly taken care of the usefulness 


356 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

of libraries as aids to high culture and profound 
investigation would be fatally impaired. To the 
student’s unaided faculties a great library is 
simply a trackless wilderness; the catalogue of 
such a library is itself a kind of wilderness, albeit 
much more readily penetrated and explored; but 
unless a book be entered with extreme accuracy 
and fulness on the catalogue, it is practically lost 
to the investigator who needs it, and might al¬ 
most as well not be in the library at all. 

In the task of entering a book properly on the 
alphabetical catalogue, the needful researches are 
for the most part made by the assistants; but the 
questionable points are so numerous, and so unlike 
each other, that none of them can be considered 
as finally settled until approved at headquarters. 
After the proper entry has been decided on, the 
work of transcribing the title is comparatively 
simple in most cases. The general rule is to copy 
the whole of the title with strict accuracy, in its 
own language and without translation, including 
even abbreviations and mistakes or oddities in 
spelling. Mottoes and other really superfluous 
matters on the title-page are usually omitted, the 
omission being scrupulously indicated by points. 
As regards the use of capital letters, title-pages 
do not afford any consistent guidance, being usu- 


357 


A Librarian's Work. 

ally printed in capitals throughout. Our own 
practice is to follow in capitalizing the usage of 
the language in which the title is written; but 
many libraries adopt the much simpler rule of re¬ 
jecting capitals altogether except in the case of 
proper names, and this I believe to be practically 
the better because the easier method , 1 though the 
result may not seem quite so elegant. 

After the transcription of the entire title, the 
number of volumes, or other divisions of the 
book, is set down; and next in order follows the 
“ imprint,” or designation of the place and date 
of publication. Finally, the size of the book 
(whether folio, or quarto, octavo, etc.) is desig¬ 
nated, after an examination of the “ signature 
marks; ” the number of pages (if less than one 
hundred or more than six hundred) is stated ; 2 
plates, woodcuts, maps, plans, diagrams, photo¬ 
graphs, etc., are counted and described in general 
terms. Any peculiarities relating not to the edi¬ 
tion, but to the particular copy catalogued, are 

1 Since this article was written, I have adopted the simpler rule, 
applying the French system of capitalization to all languages, with 
the sole concession to our English prejudices of capitalizing proper ad¬ 
jectives in English titles. Much time is thereby saved, and much ut¬ 
terly useless vexation avoided. 

2 In order to point out books of an exceptionally large or small 
size. I believe, however, it would be better to state the number of 
pages in every case. 


358 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

added below in a note; such as the fact that the 
book is one of fifty copies on large paper, or has 
the author’s autograph on the fly-leaf. In many 
cases it is found desirable to add a list of the con¬ 
tents of the work; and if it be a book of miscel¬ 
laneous essays, each essay often has an additional 
entry on a card of its own. 1 

These details make up the sum of what is en¬ 
tered on the body of the long card; but in addi¬ 
tion to all this, the left-hand margin contains the 
date of reception of the book, the fund to which 
it is charged, or the name of the donor, and the 
all-important “ shelf-mark,” which shows where 
the book is to be found; while on the right-hand 
margin is written a concise description of the ap¬ 
pearance of the book ( i.e . “5 vol., green cloth”), 
and a note of its price. When all this is finished, 
the book is regarded as catalogued, and is sent, 
with its card in it, to the principal assistant for 
revision. From the principal assistant it is passed 
on to me, and it is the business of both of us to 
see that all the details of ‘the work have been 
done correctly. A pencil-note on the margin of 
the card shows the class and sub-class to which 

1 Where the essays are by different authors, a separate entry for 
each is of course always necessary, though this is not always made 
on the long cards. 


A Librarian's Work. 359 

the book is to be assigned in the catalogue of sub¬ 
jects ; and then the card is separated from the 
book. The book goes on to its shelf, to be used 
by the public; the card goes back to some one of 
the assistants, to be “ indexed.” In our library- 
slang, “ indexing ” means the writing of the “ red ” 
and “ blue ” cards which answer to the “ long ” 
card; in other words, the entry of the title 1 on 
the new alphabetical and subject-catalogues be* 
gun in 1861. For the most part this is merely a 
matter of accurate transcription, requiring no re¬ 
search. When these “red” and “blue” cards 
have been submitted to a special assistant for 
proof-reading, they are returned to me, and after 
due inspection are ready to be distributed into 
their catalogues. But for the original “long 
card ” one further preliminary is required before 
it can be put into its catalogue. 

Besides the various catalogues above described, 
our library keeps a “ record-book ” or catalogue 
of accessions arranged according to dates of re¬ 
ception. This accessions - catalogue was begun 
October 1,1827, and records an accession for that 
year of one volume , price ten shillings and six¬ 
pence! In 1828, according to this record, the 

1 The marginal portions of the long card are not transcribed in in¬ 
dexing. 


360 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

library received twenty-one volumes, of which 
eighteen were gifts, while three were bought at 
a total cost of $14.50 ! But either these were ex¬ 
ceptionally unfruitful years, or — what is more 
likely — the record was not carefully kept, for 
the ordinary rate of increase in those days was by 
no means so small as this, though small enough 
when compared with the present rate. The ac¬ 
cessions - catalogue has grown until it now fills 
twenty-one large folio volumes. The entries in it 
are made with considerable fulness by transcrip¬ 
tion from the long cards. Usually a month’s ac¬ 
cessions are entered at once, and when this has 
been done the long card is ready to take its place 
in the catalogue. 

In this account of the career of a book, from its 
reception to the time when it is duly entered on 
all the catalogues, we find some explanation of 
the way in which a librarian employs his time. 
For while the work of cataloguing is done almost 
entirely by assistants, yet unless every detail of it 
passes under the librarian’s eye there is no ade¬ 
quate security for systematic unity in the results. 
The librarian must not indeed spend his time in 
proof-reading or in verifying authors’ names; it 
is essential that there should be some assistants 
who can be depended upon for absolute accuracy 


861 


A Librarian's Work. 

in such matters. Nevertheless, the complexity of 
the questions involved requires that appeal should 
often be made to him, and that he should always 
review the work, for the correctness of which he 
is ultimately responsible. As for the designation 
of the proper entry on the subject-catalogue, the 
cases are rare in which this can be entrusted to 
any assistant. To classify the subject-matter of 
a book is not always in itself easy, even when the 
reference is only to general principles of classifica¬ 
tions ; but a subject-catalogue, when once in ex¬ 
istence, affords a vast mass of precedents which, 
while they may lighten the problem to one who 
has mastered the theory on which the catalogue 
is constructed, at the same time make it the more 
unmanageable to any one who has not done so. 
To assign to any title its proper position, you must 
not merely know what the book is about, but you 
must understand the reasons, philosophical and 
practical, which have determined the place to 
which such titles have already been assigned. It 
is a case in which no mere mechanical following 
of tradition is of any avail. No general rules can 
be laid down which a corps of assistants can fol¬ 
low ; for in general each case presents new fea¬ 
tures of its own, so that to follow any rule se¬ 
curely would require a mental training almost as 


362 Darwinism and Other Essays. 

great as that needed for making the rule. Hence 
when different people work independently at a 
classified catalogue, they are sure to get into a 
muddle. 

Suppose, for example, you have to classify a 
book on the constitution of Massachusetts. I put 
such books under the heading “ Law — Mass. — 
Const.,” but another person would prefer “ Law 

— Const. — Mass.,” a third would rank them un¬ 
der “ Law — U. S. — Const. § Mass.,” a fourth 
under “Law — TJ. S. — (Separate States) § Mass. 

— Const.” a fifth under “Law— Const. § U. S. 

— Mass.” and so on, through all the permutations 
and combinations of which these terms are sus¬ 
ceptible. Yet each of these arrangements would 
bring the title into a different part of the cata¬ 
logue, so that it would be quite impossible to dis¬ 
cover, by simple inspection, what the library con¬ 
tained on the subject of constitutional law in 
Massachusetts; and to this extent the catalogue 
would become useless. Many such defects are 
now to be found in our subject-catalogue, greatly 
to the impairment of its usefulness; and they 
prove conclusively that the work of classifying 
must always be left to a single superintendent 
who knows well the idiosyncrasies of the cata* 
logue. This work consumes no little time. The 


363 


A Librarian's Work. 

titles of books are by no means a safe index to 
their subject-matter. To treat one properly you 
must first peer into its contents; and then, no 
matter how excellent your memory, you will often 
have to run to the catalogue for precedents. 

As a rule, comparatively few cards are written 
by the librarian or the principal assistant. Only 
the most difficult books, which no one else can 
catalogue, are brought to the superintendent’s 
desk. Under this class come old manuscripts, 
early printed books without title-pages, books 
with Greek titles, and books in Slavonic, or Ori¬ 
ental, or barbarous languages. Early printed 
books require special and varying kinds of treat¬ 
ment, and need to be carefully described with the 
aid of such dictionaries as those of Hain, Panzer, 
and Graesse. One such book may afford work 
for a whole day. An old manuscript is likely to 
give even more trouble. There is nothing espe¬ 
cially difficult in Greek titles, save for the fact 
that our assistants are all women, who for the 
most part know little or nothing of the language. 1 
In general these assistants are acquainted with 
French, and with practice can make their way 
through titles in Latin and German. There are 


1 We have since, I am glad to say, found an exception to this rule, 
and Greek titles are now disposed of in regular course. 


364 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

some who can deal with any Romanic or Teutonic 
language, though more or less advice is usually 
needed for this. But all languages east of the 
Roman - German boundary require the eye of a 
practised linguist. To decipher a title, or part of 
a preface, in a strange language, it is necessary 
that one should understand the character in which 
it is printed, and should be able to consult some 
dictionary either of the language in question or of 
some closely related dialect. One day I had to 
catalogue a book of Croatian ballads, and, not 
finding any Croatian dictionary in the library, set 
up a cross-fire on it with the help of a Serbian and 
a Slovenian dictionary. This served the purpose 
admirably, for where a cognate word did not hap¬ 
pen to occur in the one language it was pretty 
sure to turn up in the other. Sometimes — in the 
case, say, of a hundred Finnish pamphlets — the 
labour is greater than it is worth while to under¬ 
take; or somebody may give us a volume in 
Chinese or Tamil, which is practically undeci¬ 
pherable. In such cases we consider discretion 
the better part of valour, and under the heading 
“ Finnish ” or “ Chinese ” write “ One hundred 
Finnish pamphlets,” or “ A Chinese book,” trust¬ 
ing to the future for better information. Some¬ 
times a polyglot visitor from Asia happens in, and 


A Librarian's Work, 365 

is kind enough to settle a dozen such knotty ques¬ 
tions at once. 

Another part of a librarian’s work is the order¬ 
ing of new books, and this is something which 
cannot be done carelessly. Once a year a coun¬ 
cil of professors, after learning the amount of 
money that can be expended during the year, de¬ 
cides upon the amounts that may be severally ap¬ 
propriated to the various departments of litera¬ 
ture. Long lists of desiderata are then prepared 
by different professors, and handed in to the li¬ 
brary. Besides this a considerable sum is placed 
under the control of the librarian, for miscella¬ 
neous purchases, and any one who wishes a book 
bought at any time is expected to leave a written 
request for it at my desk. As often as we get 
materials for a list of two or three hundred titles, 
the list is given, before it is sent off, to one of our 
most trustworthy assistants, to be compared with 
the various catalogues as well as with the record 
of outstanding orders. To ascertain whether a 
particular work is in the library, or on its way 
thither, may seem to be a very simple matter; 
but it requires careful and intelligent research, 
and on such a point no one’s opinion is worth a 
groat who is not versed in all the dark and 
crooked ways of cataloguing. The fact that a 


366 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

card-title is not to be found in the catalogue 
proves nothing of itself, for very likely the card 
may be “ out ” in the hands of some assistant. 
Nothing is more common than for a professor to 
order some well-known work in his own depart¬ 
ment of study which has been in the library for 
several years, and so long as the art of cataloguing 
is as complicated as it now is such misunder¬ 
standings cannot be altogether avoided. Very 
often this is due to the variety of ways in which 
one and the same book may be described, and 
cannot be ascribed to any special cumbrousness or 
complexity of our system. All this necessitates a 
thorough scrutiny of every title that is ordered, 
for to waste the library’s money in buying dupli¬ 
cates is a blunder of the first magnitude. Yet in 
spite of the utmost vigilance, it is seldom that a 
case of two or three hundred books arrives which 
does not contain two or three duplicates. One 
per cent, is perhaps not an extravagant allowance 
to make for human perversity, in any of the af¬ 
fairs of life in which the ideal standard is that of 
complete intelligence and efficiency. 

The danger of buying a duplicate because a 
card-title does not happen to be in its place is one 
illustration of the practical inconvenience of card- 
catalogues. The experience of the past fifty years 


A Librarian’s Work. 


367 


has shown that on the whole such catalogues are 
far better than the old ones which they have 
superseded; but they have their shortcomings, 
nevertheless, and here we have incidentally hit 
upon one of them. Besides this, a card-catalogue, 
even when constructed with all the ingenuity 
that is displayed in our own, is very much harder 
to consult than a catalogue that is printed in a 
volume. On a printed page you can glance at 
twenty titles at once, whereas in a drawer of 
cards you must plod through the titles one by one. 
Moreover, a card-catalogue occupies an enormous 
space. Professor Abbot’s twin catalogue of au¬ 
thors and subjects, begun fourteen years ago, is 
now contained in three hundred and thirty-six 
drawers occupying a case fifty-one feet in length ! 
During the past six weeks some four thousand 
cards have been added to it. What will its di¬ 
mensions be a century hence, when our books will 
probably have begun to be numbered by millions 
instead of thousands? Gore Hall is to-day too 
small to contain our books : will it then be large 
enough to hold the catalogue? Suppose, again, 
that our library were to be burned ; it is disheart¬ 
ening to think of the quantity of bibliographical 
work that would in such an event be forever ob¬ 
literated. For we should remember that while a 


368 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

catalogue like ours is primarily useful in enabling 
persons to consult our books, it would still be of 
great value, as a bibliographical aid to other li¬ 
braries, even if all our own books were to be de¬ 
stroyed. 1 This part of its function, moreover, it 
cannot properly fulfil even now, so long as it can 
be consulted only in Gore Hall. Our subject- 
catalogue, if printed to-day, would afford a noble 
conspectus of the literature of many great depart¬ 
ments of human knowledge, and would have no 
small value to many special inquirers. Much of 
this usefulness is lost so long as it remains in 
manuscript, confined to a single locality. 

For such reasons as these, I believe that the 
card-system is but a temporary or transitional ex¬ 
pedient, upon which we cannot always continue 
to rely exclusively. By the time Professor Ab¬ 
bot’s great catalogue is finished ( i . e. brought up 
to date) and thoroughly revised, it will be on all 
accounts desirable to print it. The huge mass of 
cards up to that date will then be superseded, and 
might be destroyed without detriment to any one. 
But the card-catalogue, kept up in accordance 
with the present system, would continue as a sup- 

1 Thus I often find valuable information in the printed catalogue of 
the Bodleian Library, and wish that the splendid catalogue of the 
million books in the British Museum were as readily accessible. 


A Librarian's Work. 


369 


plement to the printed catalogue. The cum¬ 
brousness of consulting a number of alphabets 
would be reduced to a minimum, for there would 
be only two to consult: the printed catalogue and 
its card supplement. Then, instead of issuing 
numberless printed supplements, there might be 
published, at stated intervals (say of ten years), 
a new edition of the main catalogue, with all the 
added titles inserted in their proper places. On 
this plan there would never be more than two 
alphabets to consult; and of these the more volu¬ 
minous one would be contained in easily manage¬ 
able printed volumes, while the smaller supple¬ 
ment only would remain in card-form. 

It is an obvious objection that the frequent 
printing of new editions of the catalogue, accord¬ 
ing to this plan, would be attended with enor¬ 
mous expense. This objection would at first sight 
seem to be removed if we were to adopt Professor 
Jewett’s suggestion, and stereotype each title on 
a separate plate. Let there be a separate stereo- 
type-plate for each card, so that in every new 
edition new plates may be inserted for the added 
titles; and then the ruinous expense of fresh com¬ 
position for every new edition would seem to be 
avoided. It is to be feared, however, that this 
show of having solved the difficulty is illusory. 


870 Darwinism and Other Essays . 

For to keep suck a quantity of printer’s metal 
lying idle year after year would of itself entail 
great trouble and expense. The plates would 
take up a great deal of room and would need to 
be kept in a fire-proof building; and the interest 
lost each year on the value of the metal would by 
and by amount to a formidable sum. It is per¬ 
haps doubtful whether, in the long run, anything 
would be saved by this cumbrous method. Pos¬ 
sibly — unless some future heliographic invention 
should turn to our profit — the least expensive 
way, after all, may be to print at long intervals, 
without stereotyping, and to depend throughout 
the intervals on card-supplements. But this ques¬ 
tion, like many others suggested by the formi¬ 
dable modern growth of literature, is easier to 
ask than to answer. 

In this hasty sketch many points connected with 
a librarian’s work remain unmentioned. But in 
a brief paper like this, one cannot expect to give 
a complete account of a subject embracing so 
many details. As it is, I hope I have not wearied 
the reader in the attempt to show what a libra¬ 
rian finds to do with his time. 


November, 1875. 


INDEX 




A. 

Abbot, Ezra, 343-346. 
Albigensians, 249. 

Alexius Comneuus, 248. 
Amatongo , 114. 

Amoeba, 24. 

Amphioxus, 23. 
Anaxagoras, 104. 

Ancients and moderns, 253. 
Antelopes and lions, 15. 
Arabs in Spain, 223. 
Aristotle's “ Politics,” 144. 
Armenian heresies, 247. 
Aryan race, 228. 

Ascidian, 23. 

Atheism, 50. 

Attila, 222, 235. 

Aurelian, 232. 

Australian fauna, 26. 


B. 

Bach, J. S., 163. 

Basil II., 244, 248. 

Bask language, 241. 

Bateman, Dr., his ignoratio elenchi, 
42. 

Batrachians, 23. 

Bat'8 wings, 25. 

Battle of life, 13. 

Batu, 222. 

Bayle, P., 142. 

Beaks and feet of pigeons, 17. 
Belisarius, 236. 

Berkeley’s psychology, 65. 
Bibliolatry, 117. 

Biology, study of, 302. 

Birds and reptiles, 22. 

Blachford, Lord, 67. 

Blue-eyed tomcats, 17. 

Bogomiles, 248. 

Bosnia, 249. 

Bossuet, 144. 


Botany for children, 271-277. 
Bow-wow theory, 43. 

Brain and mind, 70-75. 

British Museum catalogue, 340. 
Brown, Thomas, 134. 

Buchner, Louis, 50-55, 65. 

Buckle, H. T., his History of Civili¬ 
zation, 143-206 ; his death at Da¬ 
mascus, 211; his mental impatience, 
212; his lack of subtlety, 214. 
Bulgarian heresy, 249. 

Bulgars, 243. 

Butterflies in Java and Celebes, 16. 


C. 

Candour of Mr. Darwin, 34 
Cause 5 

Chalons, battle of, 222. 

Chaos and order, 104. 

Charles the Great, 222, 239. 

Charles the Hammer, 222. 
Christianity and “ Christianism,” 
207. 

Clairaut, 2, 9. 

Class-system in American colleges, 
290. 

Classics, study of, 263,308. 
Classifications of organisms, 22 ; of 
the sciences, 223. 

Codfish, multiplication of, 13. 
Collating, 336. 

Colours of animals, 15. 

Competitive tests, 279-284. 

Comte, A., 131-142, 285 ; his “ law of 
the three stages,” 136, 216. 
Condorcet, 145. 

Constantine Copronymus, 247. 
Correlation of forces, and the matert 
alistic hypothesis, 70. 

Correlation of growth, 17. 

“ Cosmical weather,” 98. 

Cottin, Ang^lique, 129. 

Crookes on “ psychic force,” 122. 




872 


Index 


D. 

Dacia, 232. 

Daimonion of Sokrates, 113, 116. 

Darwinian theory compared with 
Newtonian, 1-10 ; theistic objec¬ 
tion to it, 4 ; misrepresented by Mi- 
vart, 11, 33-39; does not assert 
universal or continuous progress, 
38. 

Deaf tomcats, 17. 

Delphic oracle, 114. 

Descartes, 75. 

Destruction of life, 13. 

Domestication, 12. 

Dramatic tendencies in nature. 98- 
103. 

Draper, J. W., 253. 

Dyak morality, 172. 


E. 

Early authorship, 213. 
Echidna and duck-bill, 22. 
Edentata, 27. 

Electric girls, 129. 

Elephant and mammoth, 16. 
Embryology, 24. 

Emotion and reason, 166. 
Epilepsy, 114. 

Ethnology of Europe, 227. 
Exorcism, 114. 


F. 

Farrar, F. W., 257. 

Fasting girls, 130. 

Fellowships, 331. 

Fetishism, 183. 

Finns, 241. 

Fixity of species, 16. 

Force, illegitimate use of the term, 5. 
Freeman, E. A., on the advantages of 
iteration, 62. 

Frogs, shower of, 128. 

Future life, 75-78. 


G. 

Galapagos Islands, 27. 

Gal ton, F., 350. 

Genius, 112. 

Geographical distribution and geo¬ 
logical succession of organisms, 
26. 

Getae and Goths, 231. 

Gills in human throat, 25. 

Goethe, 109. 

Gorillas and Parthenons, 49. 


H. 

Haeckel, 52. 

Hair and teeth of dogs, 17. 

Halley’s comet, 2, 9. 

Hamilton, Sir W., 134, 306. 
Hammond, W. A., 120-130. 

Harrison, F., 56, 60, 77. 

Heraclius, 236. 

Heredity in book-making, 350; Mr. 
Buckle's loose talk about heredity, 
159. 

Hermann, the magician, 128. 

Hermes, 183. 

History, study of, 307. 

Home, the charlatan, 122. 

Horse, pedigree of, 30. 

Houdin, R., 128. 

Huggins on “ psychic force,” 124. 
Hungarians, 241. 

Huns, 221. 

Huxley, T. H., 29, 31, 57, 58, 60, 6L 
62, 66, 74, 78,132, 280. 

Hypnotism, 127. 

Hysteria, 114. 


I. 

Iberian race, 228. 

Immortality of the soul, 75-78. 
Imperfections in geological record, 
29. 

Infancy, and the origin of mankind, 

43-48. 

Inspiration, 111-119. 

Intellectual and moral progress. 151- 
180. 

Isaiah, 113. 


J. 

Justinian, 236. 


K. 

Kara George, 246. 
Keltiberians, 229. 
Keltic race, 229. 
Kepler, 9, 53. 
Kovalevsky, 37. 


L. 

Lalande, 2. 

Lamettrie, 65. 
Language, origin of, 43. 
Leibnitz, 2, 88, 144. 
Lessing, G. E., 278. 




Index\ 


373 


“Levitation,” 128. 

Lewes, G. H., 149, 158,160,19L 
Liegnitz, battle of, 222. 

Lions and antelopes, 15. 

Lions and leopards, 20. 

Locke, 88. 

Louis XIV., his injurious influence 
on science and literature, 193. 


M. 

Machiavelli, 145. 

Mackintosh, Sir J., 170. 

Maine, Sir H., 215, 312. 

Mammoth, 16 
Mandril, foetal life of, 24. 

Mania, 114. 

Manichaeans, 247. 

Marathon, battle of, 220. 

Marius, 221. 

Marsh's discovery of pedigree of the 
horse, 29-31. 

Marsupials in Australia, 26. 
Materialism, 50, 60-77. 

Mathematical studies, utility of, 296. 
Mayer’s meteoric theory, 98. 

Medicine men, 114 

Mill, J. S., 133, 141, 256, 305; com¬ 
pared with Chauncey Wright, 83. 
Mind as a product of evolution, 67-70. 
Mivart, St. G., misrepresents Darwin¬ 
ism, 11,33-39 ; attacked by Wright, 
105 : ignores Wright's surrejoinder, 
36. 

Mohammed, 113. 

Mongols, 220. 

Monotheism, 116. 

Montesquieu, 145. 

Morphology, 25. 

Muller, Max, 40, 46. 


N. 

Names of authors, 349. 

Napoleon I. on Russian ethnology 
233. 

Natural selection, 11 ; misunderstood 
by Mivart, 16, 36. 

Nature, constancy of, 88. 

Nebular hypothesis, 98. 

Neptune, discovery of, 9. 

Newtonian theory slowly received 2. 
Njemetch , 234. 


O. 

Odoacer, 238. 

Ogre, 243. 
Onomatopoeia, 43. 


Opossum, 26. 

Orang-outang, infancy of, 48. 

Owen, R. D., duped by spiritualists, 
129. 

P. 

Pachyderms and ruminants, 28. 
Pamphlets and volumes, 341. 

Pascal, 144 
Pass and class, 318. 

Paternal theory of government, 193. 
Paulicians, 247. 

Persecution, 177. 

Peruvian sense of smell, 163. 
Philistinism and science, 285. 
Phillips, Wendell, 66. 

Phrenology, 138, 304. 

Physics and chemistry, 299-302 
Poseidon, 183. 

Positivism and Lucretianism, 104. 
Positivists and their droll ecclesias¬ 
tical tone, 60, 77. 

Possession by spirits, 113. 

Protective spirit, 193. 

Protococcus, 24. 

“ Psychic force,” 122. 


R. 

Radiata, 23. 

Recitations, 322. 

Renaissance, 264, 310. 

Retrospective studies, 313. 

Rhythm of motion, 101. 

River-names in Europe, 229. 

Roman policy toward barbarians, 220. 
Rudimentary organs, 25. 

Rumania, 232. 

Russia’s growth checked by Mongols, 

222 

S. 

Sal amis, battle of, 220. 

Saul and Agag, 169. 

Scepticism, 181. 

Scholarship, modern, 270. 
School-books, stupidity of, 259-262. 
Schools, preparatory, 326. 

Science and theology, 7. 

Scotch clergy, 201. 

Seeley, J. R., 279. 

Serbia, 245. 

Shamans, 114. 

Sheep and antelopes, 15. 

Siberian mammoth, 16. 

Simeon of Bulgaria, 244, 248. 
Skythians, 231. 

Slave, etymology of the word, 234. 

* Slavic race, 232. 






374 


Index , 


Smell, Peruvian sense of, 163. 

Snakes with hind limbs, 25. 

Sokrates, 113,116. 

South American fauna, 27. 

Spanish civilization, 223. 

Spanish ethnology, 229. 

Species, fixity of, 16. 

Spencer, H., v., 47, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 
87, 90, 94, 95, 101,103,107,131,139, 
146,149, 160,182,184, 194, 215. 

“ Spherical intelligence,” 82. 
Spiritualism, 120-130. 

Stephen Dushan, 245. 

Struggle for existence, 13. 
Stuart-Glennie, J. S., 207-218. 
Subject-catalogues, 344. 

Survival of the fittest, 14. 


T. 

Table-tipping, 120-130 
Taine, H. A., 52. 

Tatars, 233. 

Teeth and hair of dogs, 17. 

Teeth in embryonic birds, 26, 28. 
Teleology, 97, 103. 

Temple, Sir W., 253. 

Test of truth, 88. 

Teutonic knights, 222. 

Teutonic race, 230. 

Theistic objection to Darwinism, 4. 
Thrace, 231. 

Three stages, Comte’s theory of, 136, 
216. 

Title pages, slovenliness of, 349. 
Tours, battle of, 222 
Trajan, 231. 

Triposes, 319. 

Tunicata, 23. 

Turks, 223. 

Tylor, E. B., 113. 

Tyndall, J., 132. 


U. 

Unconscious cerebrations 112. 


Universe, how little we know of it, 
96. 

University education and its advan¬ 
tages, 212, 280, 294-314. 

Unseen Universe , 95. 

Urosh of Serbia, 245. 


V. 

Verse-making, Greek and Latin, 266. 
Vico, 145. 

Virtue and pleasure, 37. 

Voltaire. 145. 


W. 

Wallace, A. R., on causes of man's 
intellectual supremacy, 38, 46 ; his 
surprising credulity as to spiritual¬ 
ism, 127. 

Wallach, 234. 

Weather, cosmical, 93. 

Welsh, 234. 

Wright, Chauncey, 79-110; his crit¬ 
icism of Mivart, 35, 105; his diffi¬ 
cult style, 81; compared with J. S. 
Mill, 88; his distrust of broad gen¬ 
eralizations, 86 ; his hostility to 
Spencer’s philosophy, 87-104 ; his 
aversion to teleology, 97; “cos¬ 
mical weather,” 98 ; his objections 
to nebular hypothesis, 98 ; his pos¬ 
itivism, 103; his attack on Anax¬ 
agoras, 104 ; his personal qualities, 
106-109. 


Y. 

Youmans, E. L., 256. 


Z. 

Zeus, 183. 

Zulu diviners, 114. 













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